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“The proper study of mankind is man.”— Pope. 


MAN AND LABOR 


A SERIES OE 


SHORT AND SIMPLE STUDIES. 


BY 

CYRUS ELDER, 

»» 


“ Hast any philosophy in thee , Shepherd! ’’—Touchstone. 


) > 
y > > 

A > 

5j 

CHICAGO A?sD NEW YORK: 

BEDFORD, CLARKE A CO. 
1886 . 



\\7 I.si'UCAOi:,D ( 






Copyright. 

BELFORD, CLARKE & CO. 
1886. 

By Transfer 
D. C. Public Library 
AUG 1 ^ 1934 



Donohue & Henneberry, Printers and Binders, Chicago. 



CT n n> 


PREFACE. 


This book, contains the substance, much 
condensed and hastily edited, of informal 
talks to free classes in Political Economy in 
the Cambria Scientific Institute. The work 
was purely a labor of love; and it is possi¬ 
ble that through it, one or two earnest youths 
have been inspired to a further study 
of'"the causes of national welfare. That 
the publication of these lessons may make 
some slight addition to their number, is 
its purpose, and the hope of 

The Author. 

Johnstown, Pa. 


3 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 


Preface. 

Principles of Human Nature. 

History of Labor. 

The Nature of Labor. 

The Family. 

Tiie Community.. 

Religion as an Economic Force. 

The Natural Reward of Labor. 

The Natural Reward of Labor—C ontinued.. 

Reward of Labor—Wages. 

Real Wares. 

Real Wages—Trade. 

Real Wages—Sharing Trade Profits. 

Real Wages—Instruments of Commerce. 

Cooperation. 

Fluidity of Labor Examined. 

Private Property in Chattels. 

Property in Land. 

Natural Law of Population. 

Imaginary Wrongs and Impossible Remedies. 
Conclusion. 


8 

5 

17 

25 

84 
48 
50 
61 
74 

85 
95 

105 

115 

128 

141 

150 

158 

169 

181 

196 

209 


4 























PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN NATURE. 


Generally, the range of topics discussed 
under the head of Political Economy in¬ 
cludes human motives to action and its ma¬ 
terial results. The teachers of the science 
are divided broadly into two schools, one of 
which assumes certain universal human mo¬ 
tives, and from them predicts, or endeavors 
to predict, results. The other school studies 
results, digests and tables them, and endeav¬ 
ors to show from the study of them that a 
certain course of human action has had, and 
must continue to have, certain good or evil 
consequences. The one set of teachers pro¬ 
fesses to be engaged in the application of 
principles; the other does not often claim to 
do more than define a policy. There are no 
hard and fast lines of division; there is 
more or less intrusion of each school into 
the field of the other; and, while it is some¬ 
times denied that Political Economy is a 
science, the writers of either school, who 
claim this much for it, agree in saying that 
it is not a science of matter, but a science of 



6 


MAX AND LABOR. 


mind; and they alike profess to give chief 
importance to the elementary principles of 
human nature entering into it, or constitu¬ 
ting it. Such representative and antagonis¬ 
tic teachers as Henry C. Carey and John 
Stuart Mill agree in this. Mr. Mill limits 
the science of Political Economy to the in¬ 
vestigation of the moral or psychological 
causes of the economic condition of nations, 
dependent upon institutions and social re¬ 
lations, and the principles of human nature. 
Mr. Carey prefers the title Social Science to 
that of Political Economy; and he defines it 
as the science of the laws which govern man 
in his efforts to secure for himself the high- 
est individuality, and the greatest power of 
association with his fellow man. Mr. Ca¬ 
rey’s laws are not laws of matter, like at¬ 
traction, gravitation, etc., but laws of mind ; 
and they are, or should be, the equivalent of 
the principles of human nature spoken of 
by Mr. Mill. 

Beginning our studies of Political Econo¬ 
my with these definitions of the science, we> 
would expect to find some formal array and 
definition of the principles of human nature 
entering into it; yet in this we shall be dis¬ 
appointed, unless we are satisfied with a 


MAN AND LABOK. 


7 


few simple propositions, like the assumption 
of universal selfishness, which appear to be a 
sufficient foundation for one of the edifices 
we are invited to enter. Here and there we 
may pick up for ourselves something more, 
scattered by the way, and will find it to be of 
doubtful value; as, for instance, where Adam 
Smith derives the division of labor from “a 
certain propensity of human nature to truck, 
barter and exchange one tiling for another.” 
This, he says, “is common to all men and to 
be found in no other race of animals”—an 
exception the full force of which he did not 
appreciate. A more important statement 
made by Dr. Smith is this: “The effort of 
every man to better his condition is so pow¬ 
erful a principle that it alone, and without 
any assistance, is capable of carrying society 
to wealth and prosperity.” This proposi¬ 
tion when analyzed, may be said to include 
the essential matters of principle and policy 
belonging to the Free Trade school of politi¬ 
cal Economy. 

First: Each man desires to better Ins own 
condition, and makes constant efforts to do 
so—universal selfishness. 

Secondly: Each man is necessarily en¬ 
gaged in a struggle with every other matt, 


8 MAN AND LABOR. 

all having the same selfish object—universal 
competition. 

Thirdly: This contest is so conducted by 
each man, by the wise adaptation of appro¬ 
priate means to beneficent though selfish 
ends, that it more certainly results in the 
progress of society than if the human forces 
had been animated by public spirit or di¬ 
rected for the public good—freedom of trade. 

Adding to these the proposition that man 
has a natural aversion to labor, and, there¬ 
fore, gives the least possible services for the 
largest possible reward, we will have defined 
the principles of human nature which are of 
essential importance to the science of Politi¬ 
cal Economy as set forth by the teachers 
who claim to follow in the footsteps of Adam 
Smith. 

If Political Economy is a science in the 
sense in which its teachers would have it ac¬ 
cepted, these propositions must be of the 
nature of general truths. Human nature 
has been at all times, and is everywhere, the 
same. It may be questioned whether men 
everywhere have the desire to better their 
condition: communities and countries may 
be found in which this desire is feeble or in¬ 
appreciable—or the desire, if it exists, in- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


9 


spires little corresponding effort, and such 
efforts cannot be said to be anywhere intel¬ 
ligently directed, even to selfish ends. But 
if this were otherwise, something more is 
needed to secure social progress, or it would 
have been universal ipstead of local. There 
must be a desire to improve the condition of 
others, which has its roots in human nature 
as well; and which gives form and sanction 
to the public virtues and institutions of civi¬ 
lization, which distinguish a progressive so¬ 
ciety from a society that is barbarous or 
lapsing into barbarism. Adam Smith did 
not understand benevolence and selfishness, 
egoism and altruism to be convertible terms. 
The motive he commends is the robust selfish¬ 
ness of shop-keepers and traders, with re¬ 
spect to which he distinctly repudiates any 
regard for the public good, yet he esteems it 
as all-wise and all-sufficient, if government 
will not interfere with it, to secure the wealth 
and prosperity of society. 

We must make further inquiry for the 
principles of human nature constituting mo¬ 
tives to human action within the sphere of 
the industries which effect the production, 
consumption, and distribution of wealth. 
In pursuing this investigation we are obliged 


10 


MAN AND LABOR. 


to essay definition of the principles of 
human nature, and some sufficient reason 
must be given for making the selected ele¬ 
ments a part of the science of Political 
Economy. The latter point should probably 
be considered first, to the extent at least of 
determining what shall be included and 
what shall not, so that the field of inves¬ 
tigation may be narrowed to its proper 
limits. 

The science of Political Economy has no 
well defined boundaries, and we are chartered 
to enlarge or diminish them at will. Its 
various names are in need of definition. To 
call it the Science of Wealth, or the Science 
of Value, will not help us, for there is no 
agreement as to the meaning of wealth or 
value. Mr. Carey defines wealth as power 
over nature; other authors make it consist 
entirely in materal things having exchange¬ 
able value. Value, again, is said to consist 
solely of value in exchange—what a thing 
will swap for—while Mr. Carey defines it as 
the resistance which nature offers to man’s 
efforts to accomplish his desires. 

Perhaps we shall avoid alien matters, and 
save ourselves from trespass upon the domain 
of other sciences and the arts, if we will 


MAN AND LABOR. 


11 


limit ourselves to the natural motives and 
natural methods of economic action, exclud¬ 
ing the material instruments by which they 
are performed. Any persistent human qual¬ 
ity, or human conduct, which determines 
labor and its rewards must be given a place, 
avoiding debatable ground, and the social 
rights and institutions having a foundation 
in nature, may be treated as principles of 
human nature in the concrete, without care¬ 
fully defining their elements. 

In the other branch of our inquiry we 
shall be sufficiently rewarded by a partial 
success. At this time, when it is proposed to 
reform everything, or to destroy everything, 
it will be worth while to show that there 
are some things that do so inhere in man 
that their foundations cannot be removed 
without effecting the destruction of the race. 
The necessity for the simplest elementary 
teaching is great; for everywhere there is 
popular ferment and discontent, and a hope¬ 
fulness for some material salvation, giving 
opportunity to false guides who, like 
Theudas and Judas of Galilee, may draw 
many people after them. 

Let us recapitulate the more important 
principles of human nature which the ac- 


12 


MAN AND LABOR. 


cepted authorities in the science of English 
Political Economy have furnished us. 

Man has a natural aversion to labor. 

In so far as his toil is not compelled by 
animal necessities, the desire to improve his 
condition is its incentive. 

Each man is naturally in an attitude of 
hostility to every other man. 

Human competitive action is, in a state of 
perfect freedom, intelligently directed to the 
most profitable ends. 

Much more than this summons and sum¬ 
mary is required to bring man himself into 
the field of his labors. Man has not a nat¬ 
ural aversion to labor; his activities are in¬ 
stinctive and naturally pleasurable. If 
“ toil is irksome,” idleness is much more irk¬ 
some. 

J Pleasure in serving others is a motive in 
the worker often as powerful as the desire to 
better his own condition, and often consis¬ 
tent with it; and when inconsistent with, or 
directly antagonistic to the selfish desire, it 
nevertheless prevails. If this unselfish mo } 
tive were taken away, progress would be 
impossible, and the most indispensable ser- 
. vices would cease to be performed?! 

Religion has played a large pari in inspir- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


13 


ing, organizing, and directing the labors of 
mankind, and it must continue to be a potent 
economic force. Who shall say what would 
be the fate of the race if it were possible to 
extinguish the love of labor, love to the 
neighbor, and love to God ? 

Somewhere, perhaps midway between the 
service of self and the service of others, 
stands the family, more directly influencing 
human exertion in every field of action than 
all other motives combined; and over all is 
the community, governing the laborer by 
its unwritten rules, paying him his real wa¬ 
ges, and fixing the order of his life. 

There are natural gradations of labor, 
and a natural rate of wages. Labor in¬ 
creases in estimation and rewards in the pro¬ 
portion that it performs a social use; and as 
to the labor which produces only material 
results, the natural law is, that the laborer 
is entitled to the entire fruits of his toil. 

The right of private property is neces¬ 
sarily implied in every proposition relating 
to work and wages. 

Some of these propositions are clearly 
within the purview of economic science, as 
to others, reasons may be fairly demanded 
and will be given for their admission. They 


14 


MAN AND LABOR. 


are principles of human nature or have 
their origin in principles of human nature; 
and by this we mean that they are an in¬ 
nate and ineradicable part of man—the ani¬ 
mal, genus homo; and if this is true, then it 
follows that they must he taken into account 
by any one, philosopher, legislator, trade-un¬ 
ionist, or nihilist, who professes to under¬ 
stand, or proposes to reform, the ways of the 
world. They are of 

“-the common, the quite common, 

The tiling of an eternal yesterday ; 

AVhich ever was and evermore returns; 

Sterling tomorrow, for today ’twas sterling/’* 

This array of principles, my own or be¬ 
longing to others, may not be rigidly exact 
or complete. In the course of our studies 
we will encounter further propositions of 
the Free Trade school requiring examina¬ 
tion, as, for instance, the Malthusian law of 
population, which includes something more 
than principles of human nature; and the 
law of the relation of numbers of workers 
to their reward, which appears, as to its 
human elements, to relate, not to men in gen¬ 
eral, but only to working men. 


♦Schiller. 



MAN AND LABOR. 


15 


It would be a very large matter to attempt 
the plenary proof of the propositions I have 
laid down. It is too large, and I shall be 
able only to present enough of argument to 
excite the interest of the student caring to 
follow it. There is plenty of room for orig¬ 
inal investigation, for the principles of human 
nature are almost unknown. An inquiry 
which I lately addressed to eminent scientists 
in regard to the natural history of the family 
relation brought the acknowledgment that 
the facts, in so far as they had been ob¬ 
served, were scattered through the literature 
of science, by way of incidental mention, 
that either the comparative psychology of 
this subject has not been explored, or the 
learning is not accessible. 

There is further difficulty as to the mean¬ 
ing of terms which I must necessarily use, as, 
for instance, there is no agreement among 
political economists in a definition of labor. 
One may make it large enough to include 
every form of service that benefits mankind, 
while another restricts it to the work that is 
paid for in wages. Popularly, as well as tech¬ 
nically, when workingmen are spoken of, 
there is meant only those who are working 
for wages; which leads sometimes to the mis- 


10 


MAN AND LABOR. 


taken idea that such laborers necessarily con¬ 
stitute a distinct class, having exceptional 
rights or exceptional disabilities; and that 
♦ while they are the sole producers of wealth, 
their place has been, and is somewhere, be¬ 
side and not within the current of human 
history. 


* 


HISTORY OF LABOR. 


IIow much do we really know of the his¬ 
tory of Labor ? It is a fact, agreed to on all 
hands, that the condition of the workers in 
England, France, and Germany, has been 
greatly improved during the present century; 
but if closely examined it will be found that 
the amelioration lias been greatest among 
peasant populations, employed in the lowest 
forms of agricultural industry. The peasant 
was excluded for centuries from the rights of 
citizenship, and the consequent larger rewards 
of labor which the manufacturing guilds 
long enjoyed. Everywhere the skilled arti¬ 
san was first to be enfranchised; and at this 
day the position of the agricultural laborer 
in England is far below that attained by 
workers in the organized trades in Europe, 
centuries ago. 

In considering the condition of labor many 
things must be taken into account, and it can¬ 
not be ascertained by a comparison of wages, 
past and present, the method mainly used by 
Thorold Rogers. 

2 


17 



18 


MAN AND LABOtt. 


The wages test is crude and insufficient, as 
it does not include the social relations of em¬ 
ployer and employed and their manner of 
living, respectively, as will clearly appear 
when the contrast is made between more re¬ 
mote and modern times. What, for instance, 
was the difference in the food, drink, and 
general physical comforts of Cedric the 
Saxon and his born thrall Gurth, the son of 
Beowulf, who wore a collar upon his neck ? 
Comparison of the wages received by a Lon¬ 
don apprentice in the time of James I. and 
the wages of a London shop-keeper’s clerk at 
the present time would tell us nothing, or 
next to nothing, of value. 

We may find in history with much pains¬ 
taking the legal status of the laborer, which 
will be misleading; for there is not, even at 
this day, an execution of the laws, much less 
was there in earlier and ruder ages. We 
know that for centuries English statutes for 
the regulation of wages had as little force as 
the Pennsylvania statute against gambling, or 
its eight-hour law. The Moors and Gypsies 
lived, and after a manner, flourished, for cent¬ 
uries in countries in which edicts and laws 
have made their presence punishable with 
death. The life of a people may be much 


MAN AND LABOR. 


19 


better or worse than its laws; and we shall 
read history in the light of our conception of 
human nature, as being always and every¬ 
where the same. This obliges us to remem¬ 
ber that the lord and vassal, the earl and 
thrall, the master and servant, employer and 
employed, were always men. The sense of 
justice, the sentiments of benevolence and 
duty, and feelings of personal attachment 
would always have some influence, and 
often be a controlling force, adequate to 
establish wholesome customs and usages con¬ 
stituting a body of unwritten laws generally 
observed. Here and there, and from time to 
time, there have been periods of madness 
and misery, and wherever the institution of 
slavery prevailed, the worst oppression might 
be possible; but the instances of outrage 
which the historian presents as a picture of 
the times may never have occurred, or they 
may have been altogether exceptional, and 
no nearer the truth than the possible histori¬ 
cal romance of the twenty-first century based 
upon the so-called labor riots in Pittsburgh, 
a few years ago. A brief period of storm 
and stress will report itself, while long eras 
of peacefulness leave no trace or sign. 

We know that among civilized nations, 


20 


MAN AND LABOR. 


during the Middle Ages and in more modern 
times, organizations of labor succeeded in 
maintaining a fair degree of prosperity and 
contentment in the walks of industry, in the 
presence of the most unequal and oppressive 
laws. It is possible that the wholesome 
ideas and customs of the ancient order have 
not everywhere yielded to the exactions of 
the modern factory system and the com¬ 
mercial spirit of the present time; and to a 
comparatively recent period the family or 
patriarchal organization of labor, of which 
apprenticeship was a part, still survived. 
This in the old-fashioned world maintained 
the arts by insuring the thorough training 
of those who practiced them, and this told 
strongly upon character, as honest workman¬ 
ship is a large part of good morals. The 
apprentice was governed as well as in¬ 
structed ; the master was responsible for his 
good conduct, and had regard for him as 
a man as well as a workman. The relation 
was formed and permeated by ideas of duty, 
subordination, and religion, unfortunately 
discarded from the creed of modern labor 
reformers, who would deprive Mr. Mill’s 
laborer, who has lost all hope in life, of the 
consolation of a hope in the hereafter. 


MAN AND LABOR. 


21 


We have instanced apprenticeship as illus¬ 
trating the social and conventional relations 
which once generally extended throughout 
the industries. We know something of them 
from our knowledge of the guilds of labor, 
but their history has largely perished. There 
were in this country usages in the trades 
and in agriculture, in the early part of this 
century, controlling the rewards of labor 
and the relations of employer and employed 
of which few traces can now be found. The 
historian has neglected them; they have 
no place in the columns of figures of the 
statistician, and oral tradition is becoming 
vague and uncertain or is altogether lost. 

The condition of labor in the past could 
not have been regulated by the simple laws 
laid down by Dr. Way land, “ that every man 
may gain all that he can, and that every 
man may use his own as he will,” nor could 
the condition of the laborer in the past have 
been as wretched, depraved, and hopeless as 
it is now, according to Mr. Mill. 

It is not our purpose to belittle the strug¬ 
gle of humanity through the ages to escape 
from the dominion of superstition and force, 
or to' under-value the liberties which have 
been purchased with tears and blood. We 


22 


MAN AND LABOIi. 


are simply insisting that Mill’s declaration 
that the “ bulk of the human race ” lead a 
life of hopeless misery is not true, nor was it 
true in the past; and we deny that there are 
natural laws which make such a condition 
inevitable, and, according to some political 
economists, remediless. 

The progress of civilization has been real. 
It consists almost wholly of things which 
cannot be defined or divided, as rents, inter¬ 
est, profits, or wages, but they can be di¬ 
vided equitably; and if the laborer does not 
get his fair share, the fault is not in the 
principles of human nature, it is in himself, 
or in bad social theories and bad customs, 
which may be so powerful as to make good 
laws inoperative, and to produce plague 
spots in the midst of civilization. All real 
progress consists in increase in the value of 
men. There has been such progress, and 
any country or community in which it is not 
found is in its decadence, whatever may 
appear to be its material wealth or pros¬ 
perity. i 

We might maintain without extravagance 
that it is a mistake to reason backward from 
material conditions to social, as it is a mis¬ 
take to argue backwards from rates of wages 


MAN AND LABOR. 


23 


to the character of the laborer; that material 
environment is not omnipotent, nor stronger 
than ideas. The shell is made by the oyster, 
not the oyster by the shell. 

Nothing would be of more interest to-day 
than a complete history of the good customs 
once prevailing in the industries, regulating 
the relations of the workers and those who 
directed them, and having their origin in 
ideas of authority and duty, appreciation of 
manhood and a customary rather than com¬ 
mercial valuation of mutual services. They 
were not laws of matter but of mind, which 
have necessarily lost their force through the 
continued growth and influence of competi¬ 
tion, which we are asked to accept as a per¬ 
fect substitute for mistaken human benevo¬ 
lence and an obsolete Divine Providence. 
The altar erected to the worship of this new 
deity by Adam Smith is never without sacri¬ 
fices; its priests are accepted teachers of 
sacred truth, and its missionaries go forth to 
instruct the ignorant in the dark places of 
the earth. The gospel is simple and easy; 
such texts as “buy where you can buy 
cheapest,” “ a man may get all he can,”— 
even a fool can understand them, and can 
understand why the human elements in in- 


24 


MAN AND LABOR. 


dustry should be disregarded, and how stupid 
it is to allow any consideration of morals 
within the domain of Political Economy. 


THE NATURE OF LABOR. 


The desire imputed to every man to better 
his condition should naturally add pleasure 
to his toil, and there is an apparent contra¬ 
diction in the proposition that man has a 
natural aversion to labor. If this be true 
then man is in this respect unlike the other 
animals. Their instinctive activities nearly 
cover the whole field of man’s alleged com¬ 
pulsory labors, and we cannot conceive of 
their existence in idleness. AVe refer to the 
wonderful story of their achievements, as 
described by the naturalists, for many in¬ 
stances in which their works cannot be sur¬ 
passed by man, and it cannot be truthfully 
said that the necessity of obtaining food and 
shelter is the cause of their labors. They 
are not inspired by that form of selfishness, 
which is regarded as the universal motive to 
human action. 

All animals have the instinct to take food, 
and are obliged to get it. Many of them build, 
excavate, spin, weave and construct,while oth¬ 
ers do not exhibit this instinct or propensity of 
25 



26 


MAN AND LABOK. 


constructiveness. The cuckoo has as much 
need of a nest as a robin, yet it builds none; 
the hare makes a burrow, the rabbit does not, 
yet they alike need shelter and refuge ; and 
there are other animals that are mechanics 
and architects, which in form and members, 
the implements with which they work, differ 
in no respect from the other animals which 
have no such activities. The difference 
is one of mental constitution, and we thus 
obtain one of the principles of animal na¬ 
ture, which is also a principle of human 
nature. The impulse is alike innate in man 
and in the animal, the only difference being 
that in the animal it is controlled by an 
innate plan which man has not, and there¬ 
fore man has freedom of invention and ac¬ 
tion. 

The effort to derive the arts from the ani¬ 
mal necessities of man must be a failure. 
Man, like other animals, and in a higher de¬ 
gree than the other animals, because more 
richly endowed with innate impulses to vari¬ 
ous labors than all of them, is naturally $ 
worker; he is not naturally a tramp or a 
loafer. 

Is not the impulse to make, fashion, build, 
innate in man ? We do not find it to be de- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


27 


pendent upon education or environment; it 
is not proportioned to the animal necessities ; 
it differs in degree in men of the same fam¬ 
ily, of the same nation, and of different na¬ 
tions ; it has geniuses who require to be taught 
nothing—who instinctively know its methods, 
laws, and possibilities of improvement. It 
manifests itself largely without purpose or 
use. Its greatest works have been a senti¬ 
ment and not a service. The savage of the 
stone age gave endless toil to the decoration 
of a pipe, and rulers have abdicated empire 
to enjoy work at a turning lathe. 

It is a general law that the indulgence of 
innate propensities to action is attended with 
pleasure, irrespective of purpose or end. 
This is true in an eminent degree, of the 
propensities having for their purpose the 
perpetuation and preservation of the race. 
The end or final cause of the instinct to 
take food is the nutrition of the body ; yet it 
is seldom thought of, and is secured because 
eating is pleasurable, and a more forcible 
illustration will readily suggest itself. 

We cannot conceive of the labors of the ani¬ 
mals as being painful, or as being reluctantly 
performed. Their toil must be pleasurable, 
for, not having invented its plan, they can 


28 


MAN AND LABOR. 


have no knowledge of its purpose—they are 
not inspired by wants nor working for 
wages. 

/Tt cannot be that man has a natural aver¬ 
sion to labor, nor can it be true of that 
peculiar kind of man, called by the political 
economists a working man. Somebody or 
something & to blame if labor has lost its 
natural delight^ If this be true we may ask 
in the language of the great mother, 

“ Who has drugged my boy’s cup? 

Who has mixed my boy’s bread? 

Who with sadness and madness 
Has turned the man-child’s head.”* 

If it be true, but is it true ?—The experiment 
of universal idleness is impossible. Taking 
what we know of the history of labor, and 
observing what is passing around us, we 
think that the weight of the evidence is the 
other way, and that there is a natural habit 
of industry, and also a general pleasure in 
labor. Where this is not found its absence 
is owing to the hard conditions imposed 
upon the laborer. lie has been a slave and 
a serf, unable to exercise voluntary activities 
or choose congenial employment, yet his case 


*Emerson. 



MAN AND LABOR. 29 

has not always been so hard as that of the 
“ bulk of mankind,” who, according to John 
Stuart Mill, are “ slaves to toil in which they 
have no interest and therefore feel no inter¬ 
est, drudging from morning till late at night 
for bare necessaries, and with all the intel¬ 
lectual and moral deficiencies which that 
implies, without resources in mind or feelings, 
untaught, for they cannot be better taught 
than fed ; selfish, for all their thoughts are 
required for themselves, without interests or 
sentiments as citizens or members of society, 
and with a sense of injustice working in their 
minds, equall}' for what they have not and 
what others have.” 

This account of the condition of the work¬ 
ing classes is found in the chapter of Mr. 
Mill’s political economy, in which he treats 
of remedies for low wages. It is not true, it 
does not approximate the truth, it has not 
even the quality of “ truth in the rough,” 
which satisfied the requirements of his prin¬ 
ciples of political economy. Judgments pro¬ 
nounced upon the feelings and character of 
masses of men are generally incorrect. Every 
condition in life has its trials and compensa¬ 
tions. Muscular toil is not more wearying 
than mental; the enjoyments of the laboring 


30 


MAN AND LABOR. 


poor are as large as those of the idle rich, 
and we can conceive of a worker for wages 
—not one, but many—honestly pitying Mi*. 
Mill, just as the sailor in the tempest at sea 
is reported as pitying the unfortunate people 
exposed to its perils on the land. It may be 
true that in England there are workingmen 
who go like galley slaves scourged to their 
toil, but this does not prove that man has a 
natural aversion to labor. It proves on the 
contrary that England has achieved a mon¬ 
strous perversion of the order of nature. 

The readers of “Walden” will remember 
a wood chopper and post maker who was the 
occasional companion of the author ; and we 
may be lifted out of the gloom of Mr. Mill’s 
abstractions, by the introduction of a charm¬ 
ing personality thus happily described by 
Thoreau. 

“ He was a skilful chopper and indulged in 
some flourishes and ornaments of his art. 
He cut his trees level with the ground that 
the sprouts which might come up afterwards 
might be more vigorous, and a sled would 
slide over the stumps ; and instead of leaving 
a whole tree to support his corded wood, he 
would peel it away to a slender stake or 
splinter, which you could break off with your 


MAN AND LABOR. 


31 


hand at last. His mirth was without alloy. 
Sometimes I saw him in the woods felling 
trees, and he would greet me with a laugh 
of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation 
in Canadian French, though he spoke Eng¬ 
lish as well. Looking around upon the trees 
he would exclaim, ‘By George! I can enjoy 
myself well enough here chopping, I want 
no better sport.’ ” 

Thoreau thought this cheerful laborer, who 
took a pride in his work and gave to it many 
strokes not in the contract, was entirely sane, 
and an altogether natural man, and we are 
pleased to think so too. 

Each successive age refers to the past, that 
golden day of labor, in which all men had 
sense of its delight, 

“ When service sweat for duty, not for meed, 

The constant service of the antique world.”* 

The poet laments a change in the princi¬ 
ples of human nature, tersely stated as a 
principle of political economy by Professor 
Perry, who says, “ no one ivill work for you 
for nothing.” There is common tradition of 
a labor paradise lost, which is incomplete 
unless it is coupled with prophecy of a para¬ 
dise regained. 


* As You Like It Shakespeare. 



32 


MAN AND LABOR. 


It is well to distinguish between aversion 
to labor and dissatisfaction with its rewards. 
The constant improvement in the material 
and social belongings of workingmen is quite 
consistent with constant growth of discon¬ 
tent. This is most marked where the im¬ 
provement is greatest. It^is the best paid 
labor that is most restless and most addicted 
to strikes; and the demafli^never seriously 
made for less work, but is imperative for 
more wages. The miner, the mill-hand, and 
the mechanic are as little disposed to quit 
work when they have acquired a competence, 
as the merchant, speculator, lawyer, and 
banker. Acquisitiveness has much to do 
with this, but there goes along with it the 
habit and pleasure of industry. 

There are occupations that are unhealthy 
and repulsive. ISTo one can take natural 
pleasure in them. Men do not always, or 
often, find the work for which they are best 
fitted; many of them are doomed by the 
organization of society to uncongenial toils. 
Many employments are pervaded by the suf¬ 
fering or the suspicion of injustice. Compe¬ 
tition—the struggle of every man against 
every other man, which, we are told, is the 
most perfect condition of a progressive soci- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


33 


ety, as it becomes general, lias perils for the 
feeble, and is fruitful of ugliness and injurie 



Reasons enough may be given why tKe 
laborer often does not jo} T in putting forth 
his strength, but we assert that he should 
and may do so; and that the conditions under 
which labor would be pleasurable, would 
also make it more profitable. 


THE FAMILY. 


Political economists in their discussion of 
the motives which impel men to labor have 
neglected the strongest. The work which 
is done under the spur of personal necessity 
is trifling compared with that which is vol¬ 
untarily put forth for the welfare of others 
—for the welfare of the familyT ") Whether 
the instincts in which the fam-fty originates 
are to be classed as selfish or social, there 
can be no doubt that they are the final cause 
of almost all the labors of the lower ani¬ 
mals, and inspire a very large part of the 
works of man. The theories which make 
the family the unit of human society and 
historically its germ may be disputed. The} r 
are not entirely in accord with what is some¬ 
what obscurely known of the life of the 
lower animals, in which it appears that the 
family does not precede or follow society in 
any recognizable order of development. 
Generally the solitary animals, great and 
small, are married and maintain family re¬ 
lations, while the animals that live in com- 
84 


MAX AND LABOR. 


munities do not. The animals have either 
family life or social life, as illustrated by the 
fox and the dog; man has the instincts 
which give him both ; they are not derived 
one from the other, they simply co-exist in 
the genus homo. With man heterogamy is 
virtually unrecognized and unknown, poly¬ 
gamy prevails to a great, but not preponder¬ 
ating extent, and monogamy consists with 
the most perfect social life. There are va¬ 
garies, like the practice of polyandria, 
which stand to the mass of facts as mere 
freaks of nature. We find monogamy and 
the family institution in the animals; and 
they always imply a more complex and 
higher mental organization, especially in the 
male, who has added to the amative propen¬ 
sity the instinct of personal attachment, and 
the instinctive love of progeny. In the hu¬ 
man race these instincts vary; the propor¬ 
tions differ in different races and individuals 
of the same race; but under all weaknesses, 
errors, allowed and unlawful evasions, the 
law of oneness in pairs, as it has been called, 
is everywhere the tendency where it does not 
absolutely prevail. If man has descended 
from the other animals as is now taught, he 
comes of a particular stock which is mated 


36 


MAN AND. LABOR. 


not casually but for life, and cares for its off¬ 
spring, and he has inherited and improved 
the instincts which constitute and preserve 
the family. However they were derived, 
the instincts of connubial love and of love 
of offspring belong to man as an animal; 
and they have greater force in man because 
the period of nurture of the human race is 
enormously greater, and its demands infi¬ 
nitely more exacting than in the case of the 
other animals. This in man allies the fam¬ 
ily with society. The family is a school in 
which the natural self-re o’ardino; instincts 
are combated; a habit of sacrifice of self is 
engendered, and love of offspring is easily 
transformed into regard for the welfare of 
children. The most valued fruits we pos¬ 
sess are the results of nature’s care for the 
preservation of a seed ; and the largest so¬ 
cial results flow from human nature’s in¬ 
stinctive care for a child, which has its per¬ 
petual source in the family. 

The programme of destruction mapped 
out by labor reformers abroad and their af¬ 
filiated revolutionary and nihilistic societies 
propose to abolish the family. Communal 
organizations of labor, from the times of the 
early Christian sects of Essenes and Carpo- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


37 


cratians to our modern Perfectionists, Econ¬ 
omites and Shakers, have eliminated the 
family.* Reforms which aim to establish 
uniformity of employments and equality of 
rewards—conditions which prevail only 
among savages, iind an insuperable barrier 
in the relations of husband and wife and pa¬ 
rent and child, and less revolutionary sys¬ 
tems have great difficulty in dealing with 
them. Men refuse, and will continue to re¬ 
fuse, the ideal society in which the state shall 
be the only father and the creche or asylum 
the common mother. Founded in nature 
the family will endure ; no organization of 
society can abolish it ; men will lose their 
strongest incentives to labor where its sanc¬ 
tities are impaired; and any country in which 
the industrial policy tends to disorgaize the 
family is descending to poverty, whatever 
may be its display of material wealth. 

Like other organizations the family is im¬ 
proved by specialization of the functions of 
its members, and these functions are gener¬ 
ally and broadly determined by natural laws. 
Generally and broadly it is the function of 
the man to provide for the family by his 

*The Zoarites are an exception—they have restored fam¬ 
ily life in their community. 


I 



m 


MAN AND LABOR. 


labor, and lie goes out from and returns to 
the home; it is the function of the wife to 
perform the duties of maternity, involving 
care of the children and home; it is the 
function of the child to receive nurture and 
education and to render obedience as an 
inmate of the home. This family of human 
civilization has such analogies in animal life 
as show it not to be merely conventional; 
and while this is not the place to show more 
fully how we got it, we know that we have 
it; and if derived from a different savage 
state, its evolution has been along the lines 
that nature has laid down. 

/ When one comes to us proposing a policy 
in regard to man and labor, the first question 
we have to ask is, What is its influence upon 
the family? Does it tend to protect and 
(improve it, or otherwise? English writers 
on political economy hold, that the rewards 
of labor, expressed in wages, are governed by 
a natural law which gives the workingman 
so much of the fruits of his toil as will enable 
him to live and to propagate his kind ; that? 
more than this he cannot in the nature of 
things long continue to receive. If high 
wages brings temporary plenty, propagation 
of laborers makes them too plentiful, and 



MAN AND LABOR. 


39 


the worker must sink again to the point 
from which he rose—the zero, or natural 
point of equilibrium between workingmen 
and wages. This unfortunate propensity of 
laborers to have families is lamented by Mr. 
Mill. It appears to him as a sufficient reason 
why their condition can never be permanently 
improved, and he has no hope that they will 
resort to the voluntary abstentation to which 
he advises them. They prefer the pains and 
pleasures of paternity to the plenty prom¬ 
ised by Mr. Mill; and they persist in pro¬ 
ducing English peasants who despoil their 
parents, but would be quite irreproachable 
as the progeny of peers.j 

The industrial policy of England has not 
extended and strengthened the family of 
civilization among her workingmen. In the 
competition of England against the world, 
for the production of cheap commodities by 
the cheapening of labor, the conditions under 
which her agricultural laborers existed for 
centuries have been perpetuated or renewed. 
The labor of the man is not sufficient for the 
support of the family, and it is necessary to 
draw away to the mine and mill and factory 
the wife and the child, and this has tended 
to the degradation of the family. 


40 


MAN AND LABOR. 


Wealth, according to Mr. Carey, consists 
in power over nature; progress in wealth 
consists in the substitution of richer soils for 
the poorer ones, and better tools for the 
poorer ones. The country which is under 
the constantly growing necessity of obtain¬ 
ing its merely muscular labor, by substituting 
for the muscles of men the feebler and less 
efficient forces of women and children, is not 
gaining power but losing it; is not gaining 
wealth'but losing it, and has begun its de¬ 
scent to barbarism. It is not acting in ac¬ 
cordance with tlie laws of nature, but is 
violating them. 

We have no quarrel with the philanthro¬ 
pists who wish to obtain a wider sphere for 
woman’s work. What they wish is entirely 
different from that which we denounce. 
The hunger of competition for cheap labor 
grows by what it feeds upon ; and just in so 
far as woman’s work reduces wages it is a 
common detriment to the community. This 
will, perhaps, be seen more clearly if the 
solitary instance of the employment of 
women in an iron mill in Pennsylvania, 
should be imitated and extensively prac¬ 
ticed. 

It may be doubted if the protective system, 


MAN AND LABOR. 


41 


which has given us an American organiza¬ 
tion of labor and an American working¬ 
man's home, can be maintained against the 
assaults which England constantly makes 
upon it in our schools and colleges, in our 
popular elections, in our newspapers and in 
our national congress; but if it is maintained, 
it concerns us to know whether it merely 
retards the operation of tendencies which 
may bring about the same results here that 
are seen abroad. 

The advance from hand labor to machine 
labor, from muscular and water power to 
steam power, was a real progress, which has 
been attended with immense benefits to the 
human race; but we rarely get any good 
thing in this world without an admixture of 
evil, and we are just beginning to see the 
social effects of the great development of 
our manufacturing industry within the last 
thirty years. There are bad effects quite 
noticeable in the abolition of apprentice¬ 
ships, the employment of young children in 
factories and mines, and the early emancipa¬ 
tion of youths from parental control. The 
mischief is unmistakable, though as yet 
not extensive, like the employment of women 
in iron works; it is a small but threatening 


42 


MAN AND LABOR. 


cloud on the horizon, which should serve at 
least as a warning. The world is likely to 
endure for some time vet, and when we note 
the changes that have occurred in the last 
fifty years we must have some concern for 
what the future may bring’ forth. It is not 
a question for poor men only, it concerns the 
rich as well; no man has secured the future 
in merely accumulating an estate for his 
children. 


« 




THE COMMUNITY. 


The great need of man in his struggle 
with nature is association with his fellows. 
The solitary man is the slave of nature; 
through association he gains mastery; and 
he gains more than this, for he is so consti¬ 
tuted that he can have no enjoyment except 
in society. 

Society is not the outcome of man’s 
material needs, nor is it the result of any ex¬ 
pressed or implied agreements. The pre¬ 
tended social compact, under which it is 
alleged men surrender certain of their 
natural rights upon becoming members of 
society, was predicated of a mythical natural 
man who was under no obligation to respect 
the opinions of others. Like everything upon 
which the welfare of the race depends, soci¬ 
ety originates in and is secured by the force 
of natural instincts, the chief of which is the 
innate desire ofjnan for the approbation of 
his fellows, traces of which may be found in 
the lower animals. This is the natural bond 
of society; and it endows the unwritten 
48 



u 


MAN AND LABOR. 


usages of ,tlie community, with more than 
the force of positive laws, of which it is the 
ultimate sanction. 

The community of the neighborhood, large 
or small, is a state within the state. It has 
its own intelligence, character and con¬ 
science, and it regulates manners, fashions in 
apparel, and modes of living. Its decrees 
are economic forces forming a large factor 
in the production, distribution and consump¬ 
tion of wealth. The philosopher might 
-safely have said, “Let me set the fashions of 
a country, and I care not who makes its 
laws.” That “ they do not do it in that 
way,” begins to be a deterring force in the 
nursery; it follows the child to school, and 
thence to the workshop, profession, and busi¬ 
ness, gaining strength continually. 

The condition of labor is a question of 
social environment. The community touches 
labor everywhere, prescribing how the worker 
and his family should live, what it is repu¬ 
table for them to do, how their substance 
shall be expended or used; and the purely 
social services it performs for him may be 
the most important part of his income. 
Comparison of wages does not touch these 
matters at all, and, having respect to them, 


MAN AND LABOR. 


45 


a laborer in a New England village and an¬ 
other in the Black Country in England, 
though they receive an equal amount of pay, 
may differ as widely in real wealth or wel¬ 
fare as if they were separated by centuries 
of time. Such a difference neither increase 
nor diminution of wages can equalize. If 
the social code be low or brutal, increase of 
wages will be of no benefit whatever to the 
laborer: if it be high, decrease of wages will 
not prevent conformity to it. 

The destinction between nominal and real 
wages should always be borne in mind. The 
real wages is not the money earned, but 
what that money will bring ; it is not money 
but a share of the product of the laborer’s 
industry ; and in the last analysis it is not 
this, but it is a proportional share of the 
products of all other industries. In addition 
to this, and as a part^ofjiis real wages, is the 
laborer’s share of the social services rendered 
by the community, the b id or good, the help 
or hindrance, lie gets from customs, taste, 
fashion and public "opinion, directly influen¬ 
cing his labor and its rewards. 

In the community of which the working¬ 
man is a member, is public order, with all 
that it implies, a matter of police or is it 




46 


MAX AND LABOR. 


sustained by public opinion and by unofficial 
agencies and aids, such as associations for 
the prevention and prosecution of crimes ? 
Is industry honorable and is the workingman 
respected, or does the ruling opinion place 
labor under social or other ban ? What pro¬ 
vision is made for education—voluntary or 
through intelligent administration of the 
laws, is it esteemed, and is there a spur to 
the development of special talents in the 
arts, science, and literature? What are the 
amusements of the community, and what 
does it do to promote such social intercourse 
as cheers, enlivens and strengthens men for 
their toil ? What is its knowledge and prac¬ 
tice of sanitary science, and is there a cheer¬ 
ful concurrence in observing wise regulations 
for preserving the public health? Do men 
treat each other courteously, is there self- 
respect and respect for the rights of others ? 
Is there a general regard for the public good, 
and are the members of the community will¬ 
ing to make sacrifices of personal wishes and 
personal interests for the general welfare 4 ? 
Are fashions in deportment, dress, and mode 
of living such as conduce to thrift and com¬ 
fort ? 

These and like matters constitute the social 


MAN AND LABOR. 


47 


environment, which may have its origin in 
part in material conditions; but which ac¬ 
quires an impersonal or collective character 
that may be modified by associated effort or 
the lack of it, and its improvement is of the 
utmost consequence. The community may 
be a force tending to a better or worse order 
of life as it may happen ; or it may become 
a power purposely Avielded for evil or for 
good through the more perfect association 
of its members. It is quite possible that 
American laborers feel this if they do not 
see it; and there is a good reason for their 
protest against the assisted immigration or 
the importation of semi-barbarous laborers 
from foreign countries, which has brought 
little profit and large loss, and which has in 
some cases made the hard problem of the im¬ 
provement of the community much harder. 

The community is a sick man suffering 
from the anti-social disorders of ignorance, 
selfishness and unlimited competition. The 
cosmopolitan philanthropist thinks it good 
practice to give the patient fresh doses of 
barbarism. He is entirely in accord with 
the stupid selfishness which sees the near 
dollar to be made out of barbarous labor, and 
does not see the inevitable degradation of the 


IS 


MAN AND LATSOtt, 


community, and its peril to the estate of the 
employer and to the future of his children. 

The tendency of reform movements at the 
present time indicates a growing dependence 
upon the effectiveness of legislation, as shown 
by projects of laws defining new crimes and 
imposing extreme penalties. The jealousy 
of the powers of government which existed 
in this country when the original state con¬ 
stitutions were formed has been replaced by 
a different spirit. It is not now deemed 
enough to secure freedom, impartial jus¬ 
tice, and equality before the law; but it is 
proposed to extend the sphere of legislation 
to include a great number of matters which 
have been left to individual or social deter¬ 
mination. 

This dependence upon the state is an idea 
borrowed from revolutionary societies abroad, 
which aim at establishing social despotism. 
A despotic government may, and indeed 
must, do everything ; but a free government 
can do little in its domestic affairs beyond 
securing general conditions of justice and 
equality. Economic principles are stronger 
than acts of the legislature; the pint meas¬ 
ure will continue to hold but a pint, though 
a statute should punish with fine and im- 


MAN AND LABOR. 

ft 


49 


prisonment any one who does not call it a 
quart. Things naturally unequal cannot be 
made equal by law. 

Dependence upon the state is not a con¬ 
dition under which there will be progress 
in American society. With respect to the 
state, we started at a point which the wiser 
part of European communities are still 
struggling to reach. Progress with us must 
be upon different lines—not in expanding 
the power of the state, but in improving the 
community. The methods must be more 
largely voluntary than compulsory. That is 
a real progress which leaves to the laws, 
civil and criminal, a constantly narrowing 
field of action, and it is a step forward when 
voluntary associations are recognized as use¬ 
ful adjuncts to the governing power. Vol¬ 
untary associations have a wide field of ac¬ 
tion outside of the sphere of government 
which they are just beginning to occupy; 
and within its sphere official agencies are 
saved from serious blunders by being con¬ 
stantly advised or directed by the unofficial, 
and must be gradually supplanted by them. 
The scope of this movement may be left to 
the imagination, the outcome of it must be 
a better man. 

4 


RELIGION AS AX ECONOMIC 
FORCE. 


It is in the higher regions of the social at¬ 
mosphere that destructive storms are gener¬ 
ated. We can see the relation of cause and 
effect in Voltaire and Robespierre, just as 
the student may hereafter observe the con¬ 
nection between Darwin and the Dynamiter. 
The wrongs which excite discontent to-day 
are not comparable to those of the last cen¬ 
tury, yet they are more keenly felt, because 
the condition of the masses is greatly im¬ 
proved, and men have greatly advanced in 
intelligence. Save in such countries as Rus¬ 
sia, there is no popular grievance which is 
beyond the power of peaceful methods of 
redress, yet we may have a period of vio¬ 
lence parodying the scenes of the last cen¬ 
tury, and if it occurs the scholar will be 
largely responsible for it. The new science 
of man’s origin, accepted generally by the 
learned, is reaching the masses, among whom 
it is taken to authorize a new theory of 
man’s duty and destiny. Revolutionary so- 



MAX AND LABOR. 


51 


cieties abroad have sedulously disseminated 
the gospel of materialism preached by Eng¬ 
lish and German philosophers, and the se¬ 
cret revolutionary press and programmes 
denounce every system and form of religion 
with such effect that within their sphere all 
ideas and sentiments based upon it are lost. 
Atheism is the inheritance of a new genera¬ 
tion, and we have the advent of the ter¬ 
rorist. 

The scientific materialistic theory of the 
universe, which tends naturally toward athe¬ 
ism, was not invented by the socialists, but 
they readily adopted it. They announce 
earthly enjoyment as the end of existence, 
and if the means of such enjoyment cannot 
be otherwise obtained they propose to em¬ 
ploy force. Religion is denounced as a me¬ 
diaeval mystification—a device of the rich for 
reconciling the poor to their hard lot, and 
preventing them from rebelling against their 
oppressors. Man is not a child of God, but 
a child of the beast that perishes; and over 
the door of the grave they have written: 
“ There is no hereafter, and no meeting 
again.” 

As workingmen and their organizations 
abroad are more or less affiliated with the 


52 


MAN AND LABOR. 


secret revolution ary societies, there is con¬ 
stant interchange of services and ideas, and 
the poison of materialism and atheism 
is strewn along the paths of labor. This 
makes the difference between the approach¬ 
ing crisis and that of a hundred years ago: 
then the priest and ruler were assailed, now 
it is religion and government that are to be 
destroyed; then necessary violence was em¬ 
ployed, now there is a resort to useless crimes. 

The attitude of the. leaders of the work¬ 
ingmen toward religion is a grave mistake; 
if they were.students of history the influence 
of earnest religious faith in creating and pre¬ 
serving exceptionally beneficent economical 
conditions could not have escaped their no¬ 
tice. A merely common national creed may 
not obviously illustrate this, yet it is seen in 
a comparison of Christian atid pagan coun¬ 
tries ; and it is seen more clearly where the 
faith assumes the form of a schism, and es¬ 
pecially if it has a taint of heresy, so that 
its followers, whether organized as a com¬ 
munity or not, have a separate social life 
with their religion as its bond and measure 
of duty. The order of life which may be 
maintained by such a sect or community may 
be quite different from that around it, and 


MAN AND LAJiOK. 


in the face of causes tending to misery it 
may have substantial prosperity. 

There is very strong testimony that Lol- 
larcly in England, in the fourteenth and fif¬ 
teenth centuries, the Puritan movement, 
Quakerism, and primitive Methodism were 
marked by a distinctive degree of gen¬ 
eral prosperity among the members of those 
sects, and this, too, was and still is seen in 
the Quakers, Menonnites and Tunkers; 
among whom there are no beggars, no pau¬ 
pers, and no criminals. These sects have illus¬ 
trated the power of a peculiar religious faith 
;is a communal bond and preservative against 
the degrading influences and accidents of 
civilized life; and there are more striking in¬ 
stances of religious direction in elevating 
and transforming savage life, as shown in 
the communities founded by the Jesuit Fath¬ 
ers in Paraguay and California. 

At the present day the Mormons, Econo¬ 
mites, Zoarites and Shakers exemplify the 
influence of religion as an economic force; 
and appear to justify the conclusion that the 
bond of a peculiar faith is powerful enough 
to temporarily change the organization and 
order of society, in the narrow limits within 
which it prevails. 


54 


MAN AND LABOR. 


If the atheistic leaders of socialistic and 
labor reforms are really in earnest, if they 
mean what they profess, their object is sim¬ 
ply to organize a Christian community. 
They may be surprised to learn that they 
need no other charter for their society than 
the Sermon on the Mount—a divine law of 
human brotherhood and human equality, 
promulgated by one who was a workingman, 
and a leader of workingmen. It is not 
atheism they should preach, but a revival of 
religion. Hot a revival of religion in the 
ordinary sense, though that is always a good 
thing, but something much more which from 
the smallest beginnings may lead to what 
the world is waiting for—the organization 
of a Christian community. This would be 
more phenomenally conspicuous as a new 
order of life than anything the world has 
yet seen in the way of socialistic experi¬ 
ments ; and all progress which fixes itself not 
in things merely, but in men, tends toward 
realizing it, to the apprehension at least of 
those who believe in the providential direc¬ 
tion of human history. 

The laws governing the labors of man¬ 
kind, as set forth by the political economists, 
are not represented as artificially imposed, 


MAN AND LABOR. 


55 


but as the common and universal concur¬ 
rence of individual action. They express 
what men have done, may rightfully do, and 
should continue to do, to insure individual 
well-being and the good of society. It will 
not be denied that they are in direct con¬ 
flict with the laws of life which religion 
everywhere authoritatively sets forth, and 
the course of human thought as well as the 
material progress of the age is pressing this 
antagonism to a definite issue. Opposed to 
the maxims of political economy we have 
such precepts of religion as these: “ Take 

no thought for your life what ye shall eat 
or Avhat ye shall drink, nor vet for your body 
what ye shall put on. * * Lay not up 

for yourselves treasures upon earth. * * 

Resist not evil. * * Give to him that 

asketh of thee, and from him that would 
borrow of thee turn not thou away. * * 

All things whatsoever ye would that men 
should do to you do ye even so to them. 
* * Love thy neighbor as thyself.” If 

we should put forth these sayings as our 
own, laying them down as laws of human 
action to be literally observed, we would 
probably be Regarded as an amiable lunatic, 
interesting as a sentimentalist, but quite 


MAN AND LABOR. 


56 


contemptible in the eyes of the man of 
science. Iiis claim that the progress which 
the world has made, and is making, is owing 
to the rule of universal selfishness we have 
denied; but if it were true, which it is not, 
we might ask has the strife of man with 
nature been more successful because of the 
strife of man with man ? Because of this 
has the earth been more fruitful ? Have the 
occult powers of nature yielded themselves 
the sooner to man’s service ? Have the arts 
and inventions originated in it ? Do we 
owe to it the great and permanent works 
which delight the universal mind and dig¬ 
nify human life ' 

It would not be extravagant to assert that 
the labors of man have been fruitful in the 
proportion that benevolence has replaced 
selfishness, and association has been substi¬ 
tuted for competition, and this is the sum 
and substance of religion as a social and 
economic force—it means the abnegation of 
self, and the service of others. If all men 
could have such inspiration to labor the re¬ 
sult could not be doubted ; and it is because 
some men, indeed many men, have had it, 
that there is enjoyment of a measure of 


MAN AND LABOR. 


0 ( 

peace and plenty with the promise of better 
things to come. 

There are superficial students of history 
who array the crimes done in the name of * 
religion as evidence that it has been a foe to 
human progress, they will deny that it has 
any proper place or influence in the direction 
of mankind, and may, like the nihilists, con¬ 
sider it easy to abolish it. What the race 
might have been without faith in the father¬ 
hood of God and belief in the brotherhood of 
man, no one can guess, but if deprived of 
these ideas to-day, it would descend to bar¬ 
barism. The sense of subordination to higher 
powers has been, and still is, necessary to the 
maintenance of human government, and this 
is so well understood that those who would 
overthrow the one are obliged to assail the 
other. 

That intuitive belief in the supernatural, 
which is the foundation of religion, is a prin¬ 
ciple of human nature, is generally conceded, 
and we do not see how its infiuuence can be 
seriously weakened or its functions perma¬ 
nently impaired by any theory of its origin, 
true or false. If we agree that it had its 
beginning in dreams, and enlarged itself 
through ignorance of the powers of nature. 


58 


MAN AND LABOR* 


and that its rudiments may be found in the 
lower animals, which, it is alleged, exhibit 
apprehensions of what to them is the super¬ 
natural, and even perform the equivalent of 
acts of worship,—the conclusion of such 
guesses, surmise and argument is, that relig¬ 
ion is a part of human nature. If the sense 
of the supernatural, which maintains itself 
in the face of every advance in knowledge, 
has been evolved from dreams it nevertheless 
exists; it is perpetuated as a hereditary in¬ 
stinct, and it cannot be explained away. Its 
existence being conceded, it is at least as sig¬ 
nificant as any other instinct having an ob¬ 
ject, and we prefer to the vague guesses at 
its origin the simpler theory of a supernatu¬ 
ral environment, which is more consistent 
with the doctrines of evolution and, indeed, 
appears to be their necessary scientific con¬ 
clusion. 

The instinct is there, it has always been 
there, of its origin nothing is known save 
that it has been a part of human nature 
throughout and beyond the known history 
of the race. As a fountain of superstitions, 
a receptacle of revelations, and the author of 
religions, its history is not closed, nor can it 
be while man exists. The German socialists 


MAX AXD LABOR. 


59 


may write over the door of the tomb, “There 
is no hereafter,” but they will never banish 
“ the dread of something after death,” which 
will continue to influence the conduct and 
character of mankind. 

The socialists put their case artfully when 
they make it the office of atheism to destroy 
illusory happiness, and prepare the people 
for a violent conquest of earthly enjoyments 
through the abolition of property, of the 
family, and of human government. The 
hope of heavenly happiness is not the all of 
religion ; it couples duty with destiny; and 
it is not the hope of heavenly joys, but the 
fear of divine retribution that the socialists 
wish to obliterate. The current fashion in 
science and current conditions in theology 
unite in aiding their efforts to overturn 
divine authority—efforts which appear for¬ 
midable, but which will be 

“ Like the lower which builders vain. 
Presumptuous piled on Shinar’s plain.” 

Atheism, with the help of science, may have 
a temporary success, but “ the old instinct 
will bring back the old names,” and religion 
will continue to be the support of society, 
and to inspire and direct the labors of man¬ 
kind. How much of harm the impending 


60 


MAN AND LABOR. 


conflict will do it is impossible to foresee; the 
good that may come of it will be a decline 
in priestcraft, a purification of doctrines, and 
a growth toward Christian law of the relig¬ 
ious life. It is only in this way that some 
social problems can be solved. “ Seek first 
the kingdom of God and His righteousness, 
and all these shall be added unto you.” 


THE NATURAL REWARD OF 
LABOR. 


In entering upon tlie discussion of a sub¬ 
ject which unquestionably belongs to the 
science of political economy it may be well 
to give the technical sense of terms which 
we will necessarily use. 

Man is engaged in a struggle with nature; 
power over nature consti tutes wealth. The re¬ 
sistance which nature opposes to man’s efforts 
constitutes value. The value of things is the 
cost of their production ; the value of a par¬ 
ticular thing is the cost of its reproduction. 
As value is the measure of resistance to 
man’s efforts, utility is the measure of his 
success. Commerce consists in the inter¬ 
change of thoughts and things which men 
make with each other; and it is distinguished 
from trade, which consists in the exchange 
of things which some men make for others. 
Progress consists in diminishing the value of 
things through increase in the value of men. 

This preface is necessary, and these defini¬ 
tions must be constantly borne in mind, as 
61 * 



62 


MAN AND LABOR. 


otherwise what we have to say will some¬ 
times not be intelligible. 

Labor may be divided as to its nature into 
that which produces material utilities, such 
as shelter, food, clothing, etc., and that 
which produces immaterial utilities, as in¬ 
struction, amusement, government. As to 
the latter form of labor we have such high 
authority for including it among productive 
industries as'J. I>. Say, who in this is in direct 
opposition to his master, Adam Smith. 

In our system it holds the highest place, 
and is entitled to chief regard. Simplicity 
of statement is attained by classing labor as 
that which is expended upon men and that 
which is expended upon things. X° the 
first class belong the nurture and training of 
man himself—the most valuable product of 
civilization. It includes also the develop¬ 
ment and preservation of science and the 
arts, which are living and exist in the minds 
of men and not elsewhere. It includes the 
social and political organization of society 
maintained by the labors of men for men, 
and the laws which live in the breasts of the 
judges. It includes all the labor expended 
in making man a moral and religious being, 
intelligentlv subordinate to those higher ob- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


63 


ligations which are related to the civil laws 
as their ultimate sanction. 

A more accurate division of productive in¬ 
dustry, which will be used in our further 
discussion of the subject, will be into labor 
expended upon men, labor expended upon 
institutions, and labor expended upon things. 
This history of labor is represented as an 
ascending column, from the savage state to 
a condition of enlightenment, in the follow¬ 
ing rude diagram suggesting to the eye the 
distribution of labor and the progress of 
society. It is sufficient in this illustration to 
make institutions and men one class, and 
things another. 


Popular Educa¬ 
tion. 

Educated Class. 

A Few Scholars 
and Arts. 


General Ignor¬ 
ance. 



Enlightenment. Plenty 
with Art and Beauty. 

Civilization—Free L a b o r. 
Plenty. 

Barbarism—Slave Labor, 
Famines Frequent. 

Savage—Slave Labor, Fam¬ 
ines constant. 


In savage life the whole community is 
employed in the production of material 
utilities—food, clothing, and shelter. Xo 
labor is expended on the training of man, 
and he is of little, value as compared with 
things : a stone ax is worth more than a hu- 
man life. Famines are constant, and for 






MAN AND LABOR. 


lack of a little food whole tribes may perish. 
The progress of civilization is distinctly 
marked by the increasing proportion of 
labor which may be withdrawn from the 
production of things and employed in the 
perfection of institutions and the education 
of men, with the result that men constantly 
increase in value, and things constantly de¬ 
cline in value, and in the place of famine 
there is plenty. We commend the study of 
this apparent paradox to the workingman 
who is tempted to say to the scientist, the 
jurist, and the priest, “ I have no need of 
thee.” 

As to the labor which produces material 
results, the natural law of its reward—the 
law of its wages—is simple. The rightful 
wages is the product: the workingman is 
entitled to the entire fruit of his toil. As 
to that more important, because more 
largely productive labor which directly orig¬ 
inates immaterial utilities only, the natural 
law of its reward is not so obvious. It can¬ 
not be paid with the whole, or a part of its 
product. The doctor who cures a patient 
cannot be paid in health; the professor 
who educates a pupil cannot be paid in 
knowledge; the jurist cannot be paid with 


MAN AND LABOR. 


65 

a part of the principle of justice which he 
establishes. Looking at our ascending and 
widening column of labor, and considering 
all that is involved in it with reference to 
the teachings of history, we conclude that 
men naturally tend to rate this higher labor 
as to its honor and rewards according to 
the proportion in which it performs a social 
use. That labor which serves the whole 
community in its protection, direction, lead¬ 
ership, ranks highest; and this order de¬ 
scends by degrees, through service to smaller 
numbers, until it ends in that labor which, 
performing a material use only, is governed 
by another and different law of compen¬ 
sation. 

The analysis we have made corresponds 
broadly to three social degrees, distinct, yet 
overlapping each other; the first and low¬ 
est, in which labor fixes itself in things ; the 
second, in which labor fixes itself in institu¬ 
tions; the third and highest, in which labor 
fixes itself in man. It is just in the pro¬ 
portion that- this last and highest form 
of labor prevails that productiveness in¬ 
creases, and that man increases in value, 
while institutions and things decline in value 
and increase in utility. 


66 


MAN AND LABOR. 


The advance from ignorance of the use of 
metals to the science of metallurgy was la¬ 
bor fixing itself in man ; and its influence 
upon things is illustrated in an implement 
which has been used by man since his first 
appearance upon the earth, the history of 
which may be stated in units of value and 
of utility, or of expenditure of labor and its 
results as follows: 

VALUE. UTILITY. 

100 The Stone ax, 1. 

50 The Bronze ax, 50. 

1 The Steel ax, 100. 

The increasing column of utility and the 
diminishing column of value, indicate the 
constant growth in value of man and labor, 
and the corresponding decline in the value of 
things, which goes along with the progress 
of society, and in many instances which will 
suggest themselves to the reader this would 
not be adequately stated as a thousand 
fold. 

As to institutions—the state and the 
church—these in a progressive society obey 
the same law of declining values and increas¬ 
ing utility. In the ruder conditions of fife, 
as in the early periods of history, the com¬ 
munity is exhausted in the effort to pre- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


or 


serve itself. The head of the state requires 
and has control of the lives and labors of 
the people. The value of government is 
enormous, its utility small. The like holds 
good as to ecclesiastical institutions, the ma¬ 
chinery of which in t(ie ruder stages of so¬ 
ciety is infinitely costly as compared with 
the services which it renders. An illustra¬ 
tion in the form of diagrams may be help¬ 
ful, and will at least provoke criticism. Let 
the following ascending columns represent 
the stream of history: 

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 


Taxation under General 
Laws. 


People have a voice in im¬ 
posing- taxes. 


Life and Labor belong to 
the Ruler. 





68 


MAN AND LABOR. 


ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 


Free Church. 


Clerical Hier¬ 
archy. 


Supreme Pontif¬ 
ical Power. 



Government Support, 
Tithes, etc. 



Voluntary Support. 


Human Sacrifice. Lands 


We hope that learned professors will not 
resent this effort to exhibit in a striking 
way these important general truths with 
approximate accuracy. It is not so easy as it 
looks, and they are welcome to improve 
upon it if they will. There have been be¬ 
nevolent tyrants, but it will not be disputed 
that the president is a better and cheaper 
ruler than the despot, or even the queen; 
there have been ecclesiastical autocrats of 
real beneficence, but the world will not 
again surrender itself to this form of abso¬ 
lutism. Our ascending columns are a history 
of the progessive increase in labor diverted 
from the production of things and devoted 




MAN AND LABOR. 


<50 


to the arts and sciences—to giving increased 
value to man. The cost of government 
would be nothing if all men were fully and 
equally capable of self-government, and 
complete self-government would have the 
largest utility. This is the ultimate goal, 
and it will not be reached by reform of the 
laws, but by the improvement of man. 
Every breach of social order, every invasion 
of the rights of others, every act of violence, 
is a check to progress and a thrust of society 
backward toward despotism. The men who 
resort to mob violence to attain their ends, 
are in the highest degree criminals, for gen¬ 
erally the ordinary criminal—the thief, bur¬ 
glar, and murderer—has directly injured but 
a single individual, while these higher 
offenders are the foes of society. 

The social services required, or necessary, 
have varied in different countries and in dif¬ 
ferent periods of history, but in the earliest 
civilizations, and thence downward to the 
present time, through multitudinous per¬ 
versions and usurpations, there may be 
traced the common tendency of mankind to 
value labors in accordance with their social 
use. An illustration is found in the insti¬ 
tution of castes which the Aryan Hindoos 


70 


MAN AND LABOR. 


brought into India with the Brahminical 
religion more than fourteen centuries before 
Christ, and which is maintained to this day. 
The four principal castes in the order of 
their dignity were the Brahmins, Ivshatryas, 
Yaisyas, and Sudras. The office of the 
Brahmins was to teach the religion of the 
Yeda, offer sacrifice to the gods, conduct the 
ceremonies of religion, and to receive and 
make gifts. The Ivshatryas were magis¬ 
trates and teachers having a lower order 
of religious functions, whose duty was to 
protect the people, do charity, offer sacri¬ 
fices, read the holy scriptures, and control 
their desires. The Yaisyas were to keep 
cattle, cultivate the land, carry on trade, 
give alms, sacrifice and pray. All other 
people and occupations belonged to the 
Sudras caste. An institution of this kind 
could not be imposed upon races and nations 
by force or external authority. It was 
evolved from within, and as a picture of a 
highly organized society as it existed more 
than three thousand years ago, it is most in¬ 
teresting to the student of human nature. 

With the abolition of the hereditary prin¬ 
ciple, by republican governments, the hard 
and fast lines which maintained classes and 


MAN AND LABOR. 


71 


f 


castes in society, have been abolished; and 
society has been strengthened by having the 
way to social services opened to all. The 
castes are gone, but the functions remain; 
and they have been elevated and enlarged 
and infinitely increased in utility. Now, 
more than ever, does the welfare of every 
member of society depend upon the perfec¬ 
tion of the services which give the commu¬ 
nity its peaceful order, which protect the 
public health, and which preserve that great 
treasury of knowledge and justice that every 
man, even the poorest, leaves as a rich inher¬ 
itance to his children. 

It is impossible to put this matter too 
strongly or say it too often. Workingmen 
are constantly told, and many of them be¬ 
lieve, that physical or muscular labor is the 
only productive, labor. This is true only 
among savages and in the earlier stages of 
society, in which the laborer is generally a 
slave. He has been enfranchised and is pre¬ 
served in freedom by the labors—intellectual, 
moral, and religious, which preserve the 
sciences and the arts; maintain social order, 
and tend more and more to induce a general 
and voluntary respect for the rights of others. 

It is a general law that just in the proper- 


72 


MAN AND LABOR. 


tion that labor is mixed with intelligence, 
as it tends to change its form from muscular 
to mental, does it increase in estimation, in 
productiveness, and in reward ; and this tend¬ 
ency is in proportion to the perfection of so¬ 
ciety, or in other words, the association of 
man with his fellows. The first implement 
for breaking the soil with the aid of animal 
power was probably the fork of a tree; a 
tool that had but little utility, and labor 
with it could not be productive. Association 
with the miner and metal worker gave the 
husbandman a plow, which was so largely 
efficient that there was enough grain for 
three where formerly there had been not 
enough for one. The liand-loom weaver pro¬ 
duced enough cloth for a single garment by 
a day’s labor. Association with the miner, 
the metal-worker, and the inventor enabled 
him to produce cloth for a hundred garments 
in a day, increasing greatly the share'of 
the product which lie could retain for his 
services ; the principal increase of productive¬ 
ness being attributable to the purely mental 
labor of the inventor alone. Muscular labor 
perishes in its use; it dies the moment it is 
born ; mental labor may live forever. 

All power over nature centers in man, 



MAN AND LABOR. 


73 


The arts are living; they exist because one 
generation of men takes them up and carries 
them forward to another that takes them up 
and carries them forward again. The sci¬ 
ences are living; they exist only in so far as 
men know them and can communicate them. 
Luavs are living; they are not found in books, 
but in the breasts of the judges who are their 
exponents. Place the libraries of the city 
of Chicago in Central Africa, with all the 
implements used in the arts, and the igno¬ 
rant race of men in that country would 
receive no benefit. With vast stores of 
knowledge at hand, they would remain in 
ignorance; with all the appliances of power, 
they would remain in misery. Transport the 
population of Chicago to an uninhabited re¬ 
gion, and they would soon provide for them¬ 
selves an industrial and social state equal to 
that which they now possess. 

Power over nature, which constitutes 
wealth, inheres in man ; it is asocial power, 
and that labor which performs social uses is 
most largely productive of both material and 
immaterial utilities. 


THE NATURAL REWARD OF 
LABOR 

[Continued.] 


The free-trade school of political economy 
gives us a law of wages which results in part 
from an irresistible tendency of human na¬ 
ture, and in part from such an organization 
of society as exists in England; and because 
it is English it is assumed to be natural, 
necessary and just. It is stated thus by J. 
B. Say: “Necessary subsistence may be 
taken to be the standard of the wages of 
common raw labor.” As Ricardo puts it, 
“there is everywhere a minimum rate of 
wages, either the lowest at which it is phys¬ 
ically possible to keep up the population, or 
the lowest with which the people will choose 
to do so. To this minimum the general rate 
of wages always tends.” In this J. S. Mill 
concurs/ and he illustrates the futility of all 
efforts to mitigate the rigor of this law, as 
follows : “When the laborer depends solely 
upon wages there is a virtual minimum. If 
wages fall below the lowest rate which 
74 



MAN AND LABOR. 


75 


will enable the population to be kept up, 
the population at last restores them to 
that lowest rate. There is a rate of wages, 
either the lowest on which the people 
can live or the lowest at which they will 
consent to live. We will suppose this to be 
seven shillings a week. Shocked at the 
wretchedness of this pittance, the parish au¬ 
thorities humanely make it up to ten. But 
the laborers are accustomed to seven and 
will live on that. Their habits will not be 
altered for the better by receiving parish 
pay. Receiving three shillings from the 
parish, they will be as well off as before, 
though they should increase sufficiently to 
bring down wages to four shillings. They 
will accordingly people down to that point.” 

Our American college professors who be¬ 
long to the free-trade school, all of whom arc 
under English influences, accept the English 
theory of wages, either fully or with slight 
modifications intended to make it less ob¬ 
noxious to the commonalty. 

The theory of a natural minimum rate of 
wages is helped out by the assumption that 
wages are paid by the capitalist out of capi¬ 
tal; that there is a certain amount of capital, 
large or small, in every community, set apart 


76 


MAN AND LABOR 


for the purpose of employing labor, which is 
called the wages fund; and that the rate of 
wages depends upon the proportion between 
the magnitude of this fund and the whole 
number of laborers. This theory, which is 
now out of fashion in England, where it was 
invented, is still taught in American colleges^ 
and is set forth by Professor Perry as fol¬ 
lows : “Wherever there is capital there is a 
wages fund, and we have just seen that the 
connection is between the whole capital and 
that portion of it which is ready to be de¬ 
voted to the payment of wages. If we call 
this portion of capital, or wages fund, a div¬ 
idend, and the number of laborers a divisor, 
the quotient will be the general average rate 
of wages at that time and place. This prin¬ 
ciple invariably determines the current rate 
of wages in a country. If the laborers are 
few relatively to the amount of capital, there 
will be a large dividend, and a small divisor 
and infallibly a large quotient. In the re¬ 
verse case when laborers are many as com¬ 
pared with the capital that seeks to employ 
them, the large divisor and small dividend 
will surely give a small quotient.” 

Professor Perry touches the question of 
population very gingerly, but it is plain that 


MAN AND LABOR. 


77 


upon this subject lie is necessarily in accord 
with Mr. Mill. There is no human element 
entering into their law of wa^es other than 
the tendency of laborers to beimprovidently 
prolific. It is purely a question of arithmetic. 
Professor Perry shows in this way that the 
protectionists are fools, and that government 
can do nothing to give better wages to work¬ 
ingmen. “ The question of wages,” he says, 
“is a question of division, and there is no 
use arguing against one of the four funda¬ 
mental rules of arithmetic.” The futility of 
tariff legislation is clear to him, because the 
number of laborers cannot be diminished nor 
the wages fund increased by act of. congress. 

The natural law of wages of labor em¬ 
ployed in the production of material utilities 
—exchangeable things,—relates back to the 
natural right to private property; it is co¬ 
extensive with it, and is simply expressed in 
the declaration that the workingman is 
entitled to the entire fruit of his toil. The 
wages of labor is the product of the labor, 
the whole of it, nothing less than this is 
justice to the laborer; more than this may be 
injustice to some other laborer. The doctrine 
is in no sense revolutionary or destructive, 
but is in the highest degree conservative of 


78 


MAN AND LABOR. 


social and industrial order and of individual 
rights. How the money representing wages 
may be paid, or how it is paid, is not the 
question. We are not considering whether 
it may sometimes be drawn from capital, or 
comes out of the product, or may be taken 
out of profits. We propound the measure of 
the laborer's natural right—a general law, 
which merely by being announced will 
receive universal assent. Its recognition is 
of value because a true definition of rights 
involves a corresponding definition of duties, 
the two things standing to each other con¬ 
stantly and reciprocally as effect and cause, 
and cause and effect—I cannot have my 
rights unless I respect the rights of others. 

Our American political economy says that 
labor is the first purchase money paid for 
everything which we possess, and the jurists 
say that it is the origin of the title to every¬ 
thing which we possess. It folloAvs that 
whatever is not a product of labor cannot 
rightfully be regarded as anybody's property; 
like the light and air it must be the common 
property of the race. 

()ur definition of the rights of labor appears 
to concede the whole programme of the 
international and other socialistic orffani- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


79 


zations of workingmen; but we shall see in 
the end, that it necessarily leads to widely 
different conclusions as to matters of indi¬ 
vidual conduct, the organization of industry, 
and public policy. 

Does the laborer get the whole product of 
his labor—the entire fruit of his toil ? Let 
us examine the matter by taking the sim¬ 
plest illustration possible. The .sea and the 
fish therein have been made by no man’s 
hands; and the savage fisherman may have 
full enjoyment of his natural rights. The 
fish that he catches are altogether his own; 
they are the product of his labor—his 
natural wages. We may suppose a tribe 
living upon the shore and subsisting by fish¬ 
ing to be all in the equal enjoyment of their 
natural rights. Famines are frequent, for 
the better fishing grounds at a distance 
from the shore are inaccessible. A member 
of the tribe, more skillful and self-denying 
than his fellows, having accumulated a stock 
or food, employs his leisure in making a 
boat, by which he is insured very much 
larger success in obtaining fish. This is an 
instance of capital united with labor and 
effecting increased productiveness. The boat 
is the fruit of his toil; it is his own, and he 


80 


MAT* AND LABOR. 


is protected in its enjoyment by the natural 
law of wages. Another savage wishing the 
use of this boat must enter into treaty for it 
with the owner, and he will get it probably 
by giving to the owner a share of his catch 
of fish. The natural law of wages would 
give the whole difference between shore¬ 
fishing and sea-fishing to the capitalist, the 
owner of the boat, as that is his contribution 
to the product; but if he exacts so much no 
one will hire his boat, and he will have to 
fish himself or let his boat lie idle. He must 
offer an advantage to labor if he will sit at 
his ease and obtain a profit, by giving to labor 
not only its full natural reward, but in ad¬ 
dition to that a part of his own natural 
profit. If unaided labor employed in shore¬ 
fishing produces one hundred fish and the 
employment of the boat produces two hun¬ 
dred fish the boat-owner cannot require the 
increased product of a hundred fish for the 
use of his boat. He must concede part of 
the increased product to the laborer, who 
otherwise will not hire his boat, but con¬ 
tinue to fish from the shore. He will con¬ 
cede as little as possible ; and if he owns the 
only boat in the community he may exact 
ninety fish, leaving the laborer after pay- 




V-, 



MAN AND LABOR. 


81 


ment of boat-hire with a hundred and ten. 
As the number of boats increase the hire of 
boats will diminish ; a second boat may re¬ 
duce the rental value of the first one-half, 
and each increase in boats diminishes the 
power of the boat owners and increases the 
reward of the laborer who is obliged to hire 
a boat. This is in little the picture of a 
progressive community, in which capital is 
growing; and as a consequence, men are in¬ 
creasing in value and capital is declining in 
value and increasing in utility. Every im¬ 
provement in boats operates in the same 
way if it leads to an increased product of fish. 
The share of the product which the laborer 
may take increases both in its proportion 
and amount. The share of the capitalist de¬ 
clines in proportion and increases in amount. 
Five per centum of the catch made by his 
improved boats and their appliances gives 
him vastly more wealth than fifty per 
centum of the product obtained by the em¬ 
ployment of the first rude canoe. 

The illustration we have used may be 
found as perfectly in any productive union 
of capital and labor in every form of indus¬ 
try—a steam hammer, a power-loom, or a 
train of rolls will serve as well as a boat. 

G 


82 


MAN AND LABOR. 


The laborer gets not only the entire fruit of 
his toil, but he also gets in every progressive 
community a constantly increasing propor¬ 
tion of the fruit of the toil of other men. It 
is a beneficent law to which there is no ex¬ 
ception ; and the demagogues who would in¬ 
cite labor to the destruction of capital, have 
not risen mentally above the condition of 
the famished savage tribe not yet advanced 
to the felicity of boat-owning and doing all 
its fishing from the shore. 

It is usual to regard capital as the employer 
of labor, but we have represented labor as em¬ 
ploying capital; and this is the essential fact 
in whatever form the treaty is conducted or 
the bargain made, because labor furnishes 
the means of payment, both of wages and 
profits. But put it either way, the terms 
upon which capital and labor unite in pro¬ 
ductive industry must be the subject of treaty. 
The savage needing a boat can not take it 
from the owner by force if he would preserve 
any right to the enjoyment of the fish he 
may be able to catch. The title of each is 
the same, and the degree in which it is re¬ 
spected is the essential difference between 
slavery and freedom, between barbarism 
and civilization. 


MAN ANt) BABOR. 


83 


As the labors of man become diversified, 
as commerce arises and the organization of 
industry necessarily assumes complexity, the 
nature of the relations of capital and labor, 
and the relations of one laborer to another, 
and each to all, are not readily seen; and the 
numberless treaties by which they are regu¬ 
lated resolve themselves, to ignorant men, 
into mere hostility between the worker for 
wages and his employer, each striving to get 
as much for himself and to give as little to 
the other as possible—a condition of things 
most fruitful of injustice and injury, which, 
we are told by our free-trade oracles, is 
natural and necessary. 

Further difficulty in understanding the 
nature of wages results from the use of 
money. It is this entirely non-essential ele¬ 
ment of the problem which inspired Profes¬ 
sor Perry’s brilliant school-boy effort to work 
it out on a slate; and it gives Henry George 
the absurd idea that the rewards of labor are 
greatest in semi-barbarous frontier life, and 
are diminished by the diversification of in¬ 
dustry and the perfection of society. The 
wages of the laborer is the product of his 
labor, whether it be fish, or iron, or cloth. 
It may not be, perhaps never is, this in form, 


84 


MAN AND DABOtt. 


but it is always this in fact; and, as we shall 
show hereafter, this is not a final statement, 
for his real wages is his dividend of the sum 
of all other productive industries. The 
money used in adjusting these complicated 
accounts is the material symbol of a purely 
ideal standard of value. We are much more 
metaphysical than we imagine; and the 
country cross-roads politician who under¬ 
stands that great mystery—money; and 
Professor Perry, who tells us in an easy and 
off-hand way all about wages, alike excite our 
admiration. 


REWARD OF LABOR-WAGES. 


In the existing complex organization of 
our industries, the first division of his prod¬ 
uct that the laborer has to make is with 
other laborers. Every laborer is entitled to 
the entire fruit of his toil, and to get it, it 
must be disentangled from the fruit of the 
toil of others. 

We have the statistics of the operations of 
a manufactory of woolen cloth for a period 
of seven years, showing number of workmen, 
wages paid, cost, product, etc., with a com¬ 
plete analysis of six months’ operations in 
the year 1881, and we propose to use this to 
illustrate the complex nature of the problem. 
The total production of the mill during 
the six months was 146,371 pounds of cloth, 
which was worth at the average price for 
seven years, $1.28 per pound, giving as a 
monthly average, 24,395 pounds of cloth 
worth $31,245.60. The number of workers 
was 225, and an equal division of the product 
would give to each 108 pounds of cloth, or 
$138.86. They did not and could not get this, 
85 



so 


MAN AND LABOR. 


for there were more than 2-J pounds of wool 
consumed in making each pound of cloth, 
and this wool was labor, employed in agri¬ 
culture, transportation, etc., which must be 
paid, for it is entitled to the fruit of its toil; 
and if it is not paid there will be no more wool, 
and the factory will stop. There were also 
the dye-stuffs, scouring and finishing mate¬ 
rial, oil, fuel, lights, repairs, supplies, freights, 
drayage, etc., these things being fruit of the 
toil of a great many laborers—miners, me¬ 
chanics, agriculturists, etc.—who are entitled 
to their share of the cloth, or its market 
price; and if they do not get it they will be 
robbed, the organization of labor necessary 
to the operation of the factory will be de¬ 
stroyed, and the business will come to an end. 
The account with those other laborers stated 
in terms of monthly expense and divided 
among the workingmen in the mill, shows 
what each of them must pay out of his share 
of the product. 


MAN AND LABOR. 


87 


Cr. 

Each workman by his share of cloth. $138.86 

Dit. 

To his share of wool. $100.20 

Dye stuffs. 2.86 

Scouring and finishing material. 2.17 

Fuel (power) and light. 2.98 

Wool oil. 1.02 

Repairs and Supplies. 2.76 

Freight and drayage. 1.37 

Expenses (taxes, water, etc.). 1.90 

-- 115.26 


$23.60 

This is equivalent to eighteen and a half 
pounds of cloth left for each of the work¬ 
ingmen after his debts to other laborers are 
paid, which are the first lien on the product. 
Observe that up to this time the mill-owners, 
who, as the workingmen are told, are his 
natural enemies, have taken no share of the 
cloth. The buildings and machinery are al¬ 
most pure labor, the raw materials of which 
they were made—ore, clay, sand and timber 
being an infinitesimal portion of the cost. 
They were the product of laborers, who ex¬ 
changed them with the mill-owners for other 
things they needed and enjoyed. If some¬ 
thing is not paid for their use the building 
of mills and machinery will come to an end. 
The owners also furnish the large capital 












88 


MAN AND LABOR. 


needed in bringing together 380,000 pounds 
of wool, and the other supplies required in 
carrying on the business, taking all the risk 
of loss. If the laborers had agreed with the 
owners that if they would furnish a mill, 
machinery and working capital, they should 
be paid for its use as good a profit as the la¬ 
borers paid to any other capitalist employed 
by them, it would have been a fair bargain. 

When the factory was built, money loaned 
readily at eight per centum per annum, and 
it was worth six per centum in 1881. The 
laborer who borrowed mone}r from the pri¬ 
vate banker paid him interest at the rate of 
ten or twelve per centum per annum. The 
laborers who dealt with the capitalist saloon¬ 
keeper paid him a profit of four or five hun¬ 
dred per centum, and they paid the capitalist 
shop-keeper twenty-five or thirty per centum 
of profit on his wares. During the seven 
years prior to 1881, the profit upon the capi¬ 
tal employed in operating the factory aver¬ 
aged seven and three-tenths per centum, 
there being no compensation for the large 
capital invested in the mill itself. If this 
hire of capital comes out of the product it 
reduces by so much the share of the laborer; 
but if we assume, as Avas the case in one year, 


MAN AND LABOR. 


80 


that the share of the capitalist was so small 
as not to be worth counting in the division, 
and that the use of the entire capital was a 
free gift to the laborers, we are not yet at 
the end of our difficulties, for our 225 work¬ 
ing people will not agree to an equal division 
among themselves of the product of their 
joint labors, which will give to each of them 
$23.60 per month. The 54 men, 33 boys and 
138 girls employed in the factory cannot be 
made to accept equality of wages. 

The problem to settle now is how to make 
equitable.division between the factory labor¬ 
ers themselves of what remains to them after 
the charges for other labor have been paid, 
and it is an intrinsic trouble not to be evaded 
by eliminating the capitalist. It would 
exist in its full force if the workingmen 
owned the factory and the capital employed 
in operating it, and conducted the business 
themselves. They would have skilled and 
unskilled labor—men, women, boys and girls, 
clerks, messengers, sorters, corders, dyers, 
spinners, weavers, finishers, engineers, etc., 
etc. The rule of equality would be the 
worst inequality and could not possibly be 
enforced. The organization of labor em¬ 
ployed in the mill is a type of advanced 


90 


MAN AND LABOR. 


civilization; it lias its necessary complexity 
with the necessary differences in employments 
and rewards. The equitable principle is to 
divide the cloth in such a way as to give to 
each workman a share exactly proportioned 
to the degree in which his labor contributes 
to the product; but how shall this be deter¬ 
mined? It is difficult to do, and is not 
always done. It is quite possible for one 
class of workmen to get more than its share 
of the product and another to get less. The 
inequalities in this respect may be more 
glaring than any difference between the re¬ 
ward of labor generally and the profit of the 
capitalist. The difference between the wages 
of the dyer, the finisher, the engineer and 
other high-class workmen in this and other 
industries and the wages of the common 
laborer makes class distinctions that are 
clearly defined, and, notwithstanding the 
prevalence of injustice in the distribution of 
the fruit of their comman toil, equitable re¬ 
adjustment is difficult if not impossible. In 
the strike for higher wages made by high- 
class workmen the laborer may have no in¬ 
terest. He may be, and almost always is, 
the sufferer by it; but he sees nothing in it 
but a war upon a common enemy, and acts 


MAX AX I) LABOR. 


91 


what he conceives to be a manly part in the 
strife. 

These differences have their origin in the 
different degrees in which the laborers con¬ 
tribute the use of capital in the form of skill 
and intelligence to the attaining of the com¬ 
mon result, and in so far as this principle 
obtains they are entirely justifiable. In our 
manufactory of cloth the dyer had a large 
capital of this sort, and his monthly wages 
amounted to $104.00, or eighty-one and one- 
quarter pounds of cloth, while the average 
monthly wages were for men $43.12, equiva¬ 
lent to thirty-four yards of cloth. There 
were men avIio got as their share not one- 
third of what the dyer, the finisher and the 
weaver each received. 

If the mill had been presented to the 
workingmen as a gift they could not have 
operated it upon any other plan. The in¬ 
equalities of pay for different classes of work 
would necessarily be maintained, and if the 
dyer should become dissatisfied they would 
probably raise his wages, while a dissatisfied 
laborer would be promptly discharged The 
various rates of compensation for different 
kinds of work have shaped themselves by 
long attrition upon each other, and whether 


92 


MAN AND LABOK. 


intrinsically just or not, they must necessarily 
be recognized and respected. 

We see here an impediment to the im¬ 
provement of the condition of the unskilled 
laborer found within the ranks of labor itself. 
The dyer will not accept laborers’ wages, 
the puddler keeps his helper in a position of 
inferiority, the miner does not divide his 
earnings equally with the laborer he employs 
as an assistant. In point of mere muscular 
toil, these classes may be upon an equality, 
or the man who is paid least may have 
the hardest work; but any increase in 
wages is likely to go to the man who 
already gets the largest pay, or his share 
is larger in proportion to the existing 
inequality. His acquired capital in the form 
of skill has cost him something* to «'et and 
lie charges for the use of it, and rightly, for 
its employment gives an increased product. 
This would be illustrated at once if laborers 
only were employed in a cloth factory, in 
mining, puddling, or in any other occupation 
where skill is a requisite. The product of 
their industry would not give them the 
wages they formerly received—it would be 
worse than labor lost. 

Recognizing the class distinctions which 


MAN AND LABOR. 


93 


prevail among workers for wages, it is illog¬ 
ical to regard them generally as a class, or 
to pretend that muscular toil alone is labor. 
There is no other field in which capital in the 
form of skill counts for so much as among 
wage workers, or which, viewing it in mass, 
it has more power, or has received larger re¬ 
wards. 

There is no such thing as a democracy of 
labor. Among the workers for wages we 
find classes which are plebeian and others 
which are aristocratic; and the latter defend 
their order, and insist upon their superior 
rights, with as much vigor and larger effec¬ 
tiveness than any other capitalists. They 
have as little disposition to divide equally 
with their fellows as Vanderbilt, or the other 
rich men denounced by Henry George in his 
inflammatory essays, largely read by work¬ 
ingmen, who have, in some instances, made 
their profitable occupations a real monopoly 
as effectively sealed against their poorer fel¬ 
lows as Vanderbilt’s mansion is sealed 
against the mass of people who pass along 
Fifth avenue. 

The law that gives to the laborer the en¬ 
tire fruit of his toil, finds application in giv¬ 
ing to skilled labor the larger dividend ; for 


94 


MAN AND LABOR. 


with increase of skill there is increase of 
product, which is the common fund for the 
payment of wages; and in this increase, as 
we shall see hereafter, all laborers, skilled 
and otherwise, have a common interest and 
benefit. 

It has been simpler and easier to give our 
illustration in terms of money, rather than 
in cloth, but we must always keep it in mind 
that the wages of labor is the laborers equit¬ 
able share of the product. As we have 
shoAvn it is not easy to determine what this 
is, and the largest difficulty in making the 
division is not the demands of capital, but is 
found within the ranks of labor itself; the 
tendency being to conform to the general 
law which makes the.degree of skill indi¬ 
cative of the degree of productiveness. We 
may safely say that this is a general law, 
that practically it has no limitation, and that 
education may be extended to every class 
and kind of labor with the same beneficial 
results. The only possible way of making a 
general and permanent increase in the re¬ 
wards of labor is to increase its productive¬ 
ness. 


REAL WAGES. 


I have said that the wages of labor is its 
•product, or where many laborers cooperate, 
it is a just and equitable share of the pro¬ 
duct—cloth, or iron, or whatever the thing 
produced may be—but it is not this 
really. The real wages includes a share in 
the product of many other industries. Ow¬ 
ing to the employment of capital in the form 
of skill and machinery, the workers in our 
woolen factory make an enormous quantity 
of cloth ; and each man receives a very large 
amount as his share, as compared with what 
his unaided efforts would produce. He has 
a large surplus of cloth, and he has no sooner 
received it than he begins to exchange it 
with other laborers for the fruit of their toil. 
For convenience he first converts his cloth 
into money, which is done for him by the 
mill owner, and this gives the character of 
purchase and sale to transactions which are 
really barter and exchange. lie wants 
boots, which are a product of the farmer, 
tanner, and shoemaker; he wants muslin or 



96 


MAN AND LABOR. 


linen, which lias in it the labor of other 
operatives and many other laborers; he 
wants a great number of things which are 
the products of an infinite number of people, 
who must cooperate to serve him, and who 
like him are entitled to the fruit of their toil. 
The furnishing of his house and his clothing 
may be the joint labor of hundreds of work¬ 
men. The contents of his dinner bucket, if 
traced to their source, would carry him 
across the continent and around the globe. 
What he can get of these other indispensable 
things for his share of cloth is his real wages; 
and he is well off or badly off in the propor¬ 
tion that the product of his industry bears 
to the product of these other industries. In 
making the exchanges by which he gets his 
real wages, money plays a useful and, in most 
instances, an indispensable part. All other 
laborers will accept money for their products, 
while but few of them would accept cloth. 

The real wages of the laborer depends 
upon the productiveness of all the other in¬ 
dustries which serve him, and they depend, 
in turn, upon him. He is one of many—a 
partner in an infinite number of enterprises 
and interested in their success. Every dis¬ 
covery and invention that increases produc- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


97 


tiveness inures to his benefit; every improve¬ 
ment in agriculture, in the arts, in transpor¬ 
tation, is a boon to labor. Ilis own fidelity 
and skill will not avail if there is not fidelity 
and skill in all the walks of industry. The 
idler, the shirk, does not merely injure him¬ 
self, he is a public robber; and the dignity 
of labor appears in this, that while it is 
directly the service of self it is indirectly a 
service of others. 

The difference between nominal and real 
wages may be so great that a comparison of 
the money paid in one place, or in one coun¬ 
try, and in another, may lead to the most 
erroneous conclusions. Henry George would 
have us believe that in the early days of 
placer mining in California, when each man 
could wash out gold and keep all he got as 
his wages, labor was better rewarded than 
after the introduction of machinery gave a 
larger product of gold and brought civiliza¬ 
tion into the community. It is supposed 
that the industry he eulogizes so highly was 
exceptionally precarious, that in it a fortu¬ 
nate feAV attained wealth, and the many suf¬ 
fered want—such want that their meanness 
of life has no parallel in civilized communi¬ 
ties, and that the sum of the gettings of all, 
7 


98 


MAN ANT) LABOR. 


if equally divided, would not give each as 
much as the average wages in other indus¬ 
tries. There are many reasons for supposing 
this report to be true, and it is true; but if 
such a division gave to each gold digger 
more money, his real wages were less than 
those of the laborer upon the streets in an 
American city. The gold digger on the 
frontier got as his real wages enough flour 
and bacon to sustain life in a hovel. The 
laborer in the city got better food and more 
of it, better clothing and more of it, a better 
house with comforts in it, and he got also, 
what the gold digger could not have, the 
attendance of a physician and clergyman, 
the domestic services of woman, the help 
and companionship of children, wholesome 
amusements if lie wanted them, the theater 
and the newspaper. These things are real 
wages, they are wealth: and as to them the 
average or even the lucky gold digger was 
in the lowest degree of want. 

The title of Ilenry George’s book implies 
a falsehood. “Progress and Poverty” do not 
go hand in hand. W ealtli is power over nature; 
and this power increases as men increase in 
numbers, as they acquire the aid of capital, as 
their industries are diversified and in propor- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


99 


tion to the intimacy of their association. By 
an irresistible law every improvement in these 
respects inures more and more largely to 
the benefit of the laborer, and increases his 
real wages. The growth of poverty may be 
more readily and simply accounted for by 
the growth of vice, of which laborers have 
no monopoly—from it, merely because they 
are workers and not idlers they are largely 
protected—and it brings rich and poor alike 
to one common level of wretchedness. 

We have probably discredited the theory 
of Professor Perry that the wages of labor 
is a question in arithmetic to be worked out 
upon a slate, and the boys in his class will un¬ 
derstand the matter without further illustra¬ 
tion. There is a common fund, "the product 
of all the industries, from which each laborer 
gets his real wages, not without diminution, 
for the indirect way in which be makes his 
contribution to the general treasury and 
draws out his share of the contributions of 
others, costs him a large part of the fruits of 
his toil. The operation involves the use of 
instruments of commerce—roads, ships, wag¬ 
ons and cars—every improvement of which 
is a benefit to the laborer by increasing his 
real wages. They are instruments of associ- 



100 


MAN AND LABOB. 


ation and therefore perform a useful function, 
but they add nothing to the product of labor; 
and the rewards of labor increase just in the 
proportion that they may be dispensed with 
by bringing into closer association all the 
useful industries. As the plow, the loom, 
and the anvil are nearer together, the real 
wages of the farmer, the cloth-maker and the 
iron-worker increase, by dispensing with the 
tax for the use of roads and ships, and wag¬ 
ons and cars, and another tax for the costl} r 
services of a multitude of men who add 
nothing whatever to the fund from which 
wages are paid, but abstract for their own 
use a very large portion of it. This is the 
policy of protection to home industry; and it 
is in direct opposition to the theory of free 
trade, which would have the plow in one 
country—America, for instance, and the loom 
and the anvil thousands of miles away—in 
England, for instance, so as to give employ¬ 
ment to many ships and wagons and cars, 
and to a multitude of transporters, clerks, 
and traders, who take a large share of the 
wheat and iron and cloth from the common 
fund belonging to the workers for wages. 

The reason given by the free-traders for 
classing trading with the productive Indus- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


101 


tries is that it confers value upon things. 
The farther the producer and consumer can 
be separated the more power the trader will 
have in this respect; but we have seen that 
what is wanted is to reduce the value of 
things, not to increase it, that such increased 
value is not wealth but want. 

Adam Smith puts the case that if the to¬ 
bacco, which in England is worth only a 
hundred thousand pounds, when sent to 
France will purchase wine which is in Eng¬ 
land worth a hundred and ten thousand 
pounds, the exchange will augment the capi¬ 
tal of England ten thousand pounds. This 
appears to him an increase of wealth. If the 
English trader could get up a corner in wine, 
and double its price, making it worth two 
hundred thousand pounds, then by the same 
reasoning he would increase the wealth of 
England ten times as much as in the instance 
given; or a corner in tobacco would do the 
same, leaving out the wine trade. In Dr. 
Smith’s case England has lost a certain 
amount of tobacco, and in its place has ob¬ 
tained a certain quantity of wine. The cap¬ 
ital of the country has not been increased in 
the slightest degree; there has been addi¬ 
tional value conferred upon wine beyond 


102 


MAN AND LABOR. 


what it bore in France, and the greater the 
increase of this value, the greater is. the ne¬ 
cessity for the English laborer who wants 
wine, to give more labor, more of the fruits 
of his toil, to get it. 

Dr. Way land says in his “ Elements of 
Political Economy ,' 1 “ that exchangers are as 
necessary to the cheapness of production as 
producers themselves,” which we grant; it 
is unfortunately true. a IIence,” he continues, 
“ we also see how absurd is the outcry some¬ 
times against them, because it is said, the(/pro¬ 
duce nothing. The laborer may sometimes 
complain that the merchant is rich, and that 
lie is poor, that the merchant stands at his 
desk, while he labors in the street; that the 
merchant rides in his carriage, while he trav¬ 
els on foot. But it may be for him some con¬ 
solation to remember that were not the mer¬ 
chant rich, the laborer would be still poorer, 
for every article would be dearer; and be¬ 
sides there would be no one to pay for the 
labor with which alone he is able to purchase 
it. Were not the merchant to be at his desk, 
the poor man would have no labor to do in 
the street; and were not the merchant able 
to ride in his carriage, the laborer would be 
obliged to go barefoot,” 


i 


MAX AND LABOR. 


103 


The burdensome tax upon labor imposed 
by trade could not have a more full and 
frank admission than this, nor could there be 
a more stupid apology for it. Taking the 
whole range of exchanges which laborers 
should make with each other, and which the 
huckster, groceryman, commission merchant, 
jobber, and retail dealer make for them, not 
less than one-third of their product is lost by 
the way, and the case is worse as the ma¬ 
chinery is multiplied. There are retail deal¬ 
ers upon retail dealers, and a smaller retail 
dealer still for the service of the poorest 
laborers, whose tribute to trade takes almost 
the entire fruit of their toil. 

Tt is not one merchant who keeps a car¬ 
riage at the expense of Dr. Way land’s 
laborer. The commission merchant has a 
very fine one to begin with; the jobber and 
the retail dealer also keep their carriages; 
so also do the junior partners; the head 
clerks imitate their employers; and almost 
everybody connected with the business of 
moving goods from place to place, except 
the laborers who lift and carry them, scorns 
to go afoot. Here are the finest squares 
in a great city—they are owned and occupied 
by the wholesale dealers and commission 


104 


MAN AND LABOK. 


merchants. Here is street after street de¬ 
voted to the jobbing trade; here are thou¬ 
sands of retail dealers and an array of clerks, 
bookkeepers and other servants—and all are 
a tax upon productive industry. Their mul¬ 
tiplication tends to diminish the value of 
labor and increase the value of things. The 
services they render are in part useful and 
necessary, but a multitude of them might be 
profitably eliminated. They are parasites 
upon labor that have enormously increased 
in numbers in this country since the close of 
the civil war. Where there was one broker 
in stocks, or wool, or grain, or other merchan¬ 
dise twenty years ago, there are a hundred 
now, and some producer loses the larger part 
of what they gain. Every article of manu¬ 
facture pays one, and sometimes two com¬ 
missions, and two or three profits before the 
laborer gets his share of it. The multiplica¬ 
tion of saloons in the liquor trade, and of 
retail shops in all other trades, has been 
enormous. The burden of all this is becom¬ 
ing greater than labor can bear, and it is no 
wonder that times are hard and laborers 
badly off. The laborer pays for it all.. It 
all comes out of the product. 


BEAL WAGES—TRADE. 


Plenty does not consist in an abundance 
of necessary or useful things that are inac¬ 
cessible to those who need them. There is 
always plenty of fish in the sea. There was 
plenty of food in Ireland during the famine 
years of 1840-7. The American ships laden 
with supplies for its starving people encoun¬ 
tered vessels carrying Irish agricultural pro¬ 
ducts to England in the usual course of 
trade. During the famine years the exporta¬ 
tion of grain from Ireland to England aggre¬ 
gated 22,222,410 bushels. Cheapness and 
plenty are not identical or convertible terms. 

The organization of industries has in¬ 
creased productiveness enormously, but the 
workman in one of them is necessarily so 
situated that the entire fruit of his toil, how¬ 
ever large it may be, if received by him in 
kind, would be of little use to him. The 
cloth weaver, with all the cloth he made in 
his hands, would starve to death. The farm 
laborer, with all the food he produced in his 
hands, would be houseless and naked. The 
105 



106 


MAN AND LABOR. 


exchanges which these laborers must effect 
are, first, they must convert their share of 
their products into money—this is their 
nominal wages; next, they must convert 
their money into food, clothing, shelter, 
mental improvement and enjoyment, etc.— 
which constitute their real wages. The first 
exchange is made with the employer, to 
whom the laborer surrenders liis share of the 
product for compensation that is customary, 
or which is adjusted from time to time by 
agreements between the parties. The 
employer takes the risk of the market—of 
gaining or losing by the transaction—and 
he is deeply interested in disposing of the 
product to the best advantage. He studies 
the course of trade, negotiates with commis¬ 
sion and wholesale merchants, employs 
traveling salesmen, bookkeepers, clerks and 
managers. This is the principal function of 
the employer, the risk in it is great, and it 
requires special training and skill, which 
workmen generally do not possess, as is. 
shown by the.fate of enterprises organized 
for cooperative production, which have been 
generally unsuccessful because of the lack of 
commercial, or what is called business talent. 
The wages system is, and must continue for 


MAN AND LABOR. 


107 


a great while to be, better and safer for the. 
laborer than cooperation pure and simple, 
with the hazards attending it. 

It is upon the fixing of their nominal 
wages, the money price of labor, that the 
attention of the workingmen is concentrated. 
The struggle over this point is called a war 
between labor and capital, and increase or 
diminution of the money price of labor is 
taken to mean success upon one side or the 
other. This conflict is regarded as natural 
and necessary, and it is supposed that a step 
has been gained when all the employers and 
all the workingmen in a particular industry 
are organized into military camps, frequently 
carrying on hostilities without regard to the 
rules of civilized warfare! It is here that 
the destruction of capital is advocated by 
those idiots referred to in a former chapter, 
of the mental caliber of the tribe of starving 
savages, who have not attained to the felic¬ 
ity of boat owning, and who do all their 
fishing from the shore. 

This point of conflict, where the money 
price of labor is adjusted, is first in impor¬ 
tance, but not of the largest consequence. 
The changes which may T>e effected here by 
collision between employers and workmen 


108 


MAN AND LABOli. 


are insignificant when compared with changes 
vaguely known as “ had times ” and “ good 
times ” in the wider field of real wages, into 
which the laborer must at once enter with 
his earnings in his hand to secure all the 
goods for mind and body that sustain his 
activities and constitute his life. In this 
adventure we are told that every thing has 
been made easy for him. lie finds himself 
surrounded by a host of people whose anxiety 
to render him service gives him the greatest 
possible advantage. He has but to pick and 
choose. He is under the protection of com¬ 
petition, an all-powerful and beneficent deity 
with whom he is a peculiar favorite. “ Com¬ 
petition,” says Hr. Smith, “ is the great regu¬ 
lator of industrial action. It is beneficent, 
just, and equalizing. In the market of the 
world it is what gravitation is in the mech¬ 
anism of the heavens, an all-combining and 
balancing and beneficent law. Any invasion 
of this principle is contrary to the law of 
nature, and of sound political economy.” 

Competition may have wonderful effects 
in the market of the world, but there are a 
great many things within the sphere of the 
expenditure of wages which it cannot touch; 
and, as to the things which might be affected 


MAN ANt) LABOR. 


109 


by it, it is either injurious or has a trick of 
failing at the moment when something is 
expected of it. 

Taxes are unaffected by competition, and 
the difference between good and bad govern- 
ment may make a very great difference in 
the burden upon wages. The fees of the 
doctor and lawyer and other professional 
men are not competitive, but are regulated 
uniformly by a standard of their own. The 
charges for light and water are generally 
just what the municipality or a private cor¬ 
poration chooses to make them. Rents are 
practically unaffected by competition—“the 
market of the world ” does not supply houses 
—and as the dwelling of the laborer must 
perforce be near to his labors the competi¬ 
tion for the kind of house he needs is apt to 
be one-sided—between those who want— 
and this does not inure to his advantage. 
More than a third of his wages is expended 
by the high class laborer without any pro¬ 
tection from the beneficent law eulogized by 
Adam Smith; but we are assured that he 
will come to it at last, in the domain of 
transportation and trade. 

It is just here, however, that certain indis¬ 
pensable conditions may be lacking, or the 


110 


MAN AND LABOR, 


beneficent law fails to assert itself. The 
prices of articles of trade are regulated in a 
general way by the markets of the world; 
but the efforts of a multitude- of people 
skilled in the art of buying cheap and selling 
dear, buying cheap from the producer and 
selling dear to the consumer, do not seem very 
effective in benefiting the laborers at either 
end of the process. In the first place the 
traders must all be supported by the traffic, 
and, as Dr. Way land has remarked, they 
must be supported in a much better style 
than that m which the laborers can afford to 
live. He regards it as quite natural and 
proper that the trader should keep his car¬ 
riage while the laborer goes afoot; and the 
good doctor sees some occult connection be¬ 
tween the ability of the trader to keep his 
carriage and the laborer’s ability to wear 
shoes, for he says if the trader did not keep his 
carriage the laborer would not merely go a- 
foot—he would go barefoot! 

Though the prices of articles of food, 
clothing, etc., are regulated in a general 
way bv the markets of the world, the ad¬ 
vantages of fluctuations in price may not 
reach the consumer, while its disadvantages 
always do. The decline in prices, which 


MAN AND LABOR. 


Ill 


hurts the producing laborer, may not reach 
the consuming laborer at all. The latter has 
seldom any knowledge of the markets, or if 
he has, he has not the expert knowledge of 
kinds and qualities of goods which will 
enable him to protect himself from the tricks 
of trade The advantage gets itself divided 
up among transporters, brokers, commission 
merchants, wholesale merchants, jobbers, 
and retail dealers—all skilled in the art of 
buying cheap and selling dear, and the loss 
of the producing laborer is pretty much all 
their gain. 

Competition among these experts is very 
much of a sham, and it is especially the case 
that it becomes less potent as small traders 
are multiplied. Increase in the number of 
saloons does not improve the quality or 
diminish the price of beer. In a community 
where the farmers deal directly with the 
villagers, the opening of a dozen huckster- 
shops intercepts the farmers’ supplies, and 
makes vegetables more costly. If ten 
traders "are doing a good business in a town, 
the opening of five more stores does not 
cheapen goods to purchasers. The traders 
must be supported by their trade; and com¬ 
bination is so much more profitable than 


112 


MAN AND LABOR. 


competition that the equalizing law of Dr. 
Smith is not allowed to assert itself in any 
largely beneficent way. Associating himself 
strongly with his fellows to fight the capital¬ 
ist employer, who is his natural ally, the 
laborer encounters without organization or 
assistance or intelligence a horde of other 
capitalists who are his natural enemies. 

We do not put this case too strongly. 
The heaviest tax that everybody pays is the 
tax to trade, and it increases in weight in 
proportion to the inability to bear it. The- 
indispensable service of the transportation 
of commodities, their storage, and division, 
might and should be performed with the 
least possible friction and at very small cost, 
but it is performed with the greatest possible 
friction and at the highest possible cost. 

Of transportation and its instruments— 
roads, engines, cars, ships, etc.,—we shall 
treat hereafter. It is a difficult subject, 
bristling with problems for the student; and 
not to be pronounced upon off-hand by re¬ 
formers, or rashly acted upon by legislators. 
Its burdens can be alleviated by bringing the 
producers and consumers together, which is 
effected when the factory is erected near to 
the farm, and the farmer and workman 


MAN AND LABOR. 


113 


make their exchanges directly with each 
other. The impediments to this are great 
and often insurmountable, and it is to the 
interest of traders that this should continue 
to be so. Their theory is that the American 
laborer who produces cotton should give it 
to them to be carried to England and man¬ 
ufactured into cloth; that the American la¬ 
borer who produces corn should give it 
to them to carry to England, where they 
will trade it for cloth, which they will bring 
back for the use of the American producers 
of cotton and corn. This would employ an 
infinite number of cars and wagons and 
ships, and a multitude of bankers, brokers, 
agents, commission merchants, wholesale and 
retail dealers, clerks and servants, who add 
nothing whatever to the product of cotton, 
or cloth or corn. The advocates of this system 
never weary of showing how it is a benefit 
to everybody, by cheapening commodities— 
a claim which is false in any other respect 
than the temporary cheapness that checks 
production and consumption; and we have 
seen that cheapness does not mean plenty— 
that plenty exists only where there is the 
power to consume and use the necessaries 
and comforts of life. 

8 


114 


MAN AND LABOR. 


In the field of real wages the isolated 
laborer is helpless. He has the right to in¬ 
voke the aid of his government, and he has 
the power of accomplishing much of good 
through association with his fellows. Gov¬ 
ernment has the power and it is its duty to 
regulate international trade by protective 
and prohibitory duties. It has the power 
and it is its duty to regulate internal 
trade, the only question being what is 
best and wisest to do. It has plenary 
power over money, which is the principal 
instrument of commerce. In these broad 
matters the laborer—the wage-earner has no 
several interest from that of the community. 
It is as a citizen, acting with other citizens, 
that he can secure the best service at the 
smallest cost, bv giving the powers of gov¬ 
ernment to those who will administer them 
with intelligence and honesty. 


REAL W AGES—SHARIN'G TRADE 
PROFITS. 


The assumption that trade is naturally 
and necessarily self-regulating in accordance 
with the best interests of the community 
has generally passed without question. A 
manufacturer may become odious through 
success, but no one criticizes the righteous¬ 
ness or legitimacy of the shop-keeper's 
profits. The founder of a manufacturing 
business which employed a large number of 
skilled workingmen, all of whom are well 
off, died the other day, leaving an estate 
of a million dollars. He was denounced in 
the free-trade press as a monopolist and a 
public robber, because under the beneficent 
protection of the tariff laws, in an industry 
open to every American citizen, he had made 
a fortune by improving the quality and re¬ 
ducing the price of an article of prime neces¬ 
sity, of which England had enjoyed a trade 
monopoly for many years. Of the great 
fortunes acquired in trading in this very ar¬ 
ticle there is never a question. 

115 



116 


MAN AND LABOR. 


The manufacturers of the country are just 
now subjected to an inquisitorial visitation 
of the United States Treasury Department, 
and are required to disclose the cost of their 
goods, and the cost of every stage of the 
processes they conduct, the purpose being to 
use the information in modifying the tariff 
so that importers and traders may have a 
larger traffic. There seems to be no end to 
the power and influence of traders, and no 
possible escape from the necessity of con¬ 
tributing to their opulence. The system un¬ 
der which the community obtains its dail}" 
supplies of food, clothing, etc., is as costly 
and wasteful as it can be made, but every¬ 
body is too busy, or too lazy, or too unintel¬ 
ligent to devise something better. 

Here, for instance, is the way the work¬ 
ing-woman in a cotton factory in the town 

of A-gets any of the dress goods she has 

made, the whole product of the factor}" being 
“handled” by one great commission house 
in the city of B. The working-woman pays 

1. Expressage 300 miles to B. 

2. Commission on sale to wholesale mer¬ 
chant at B. 

3. Profit on sale by merchant to shop¬ 
keeper in town of A. 


MAN AND LABOR. 


117 


4. Freight and charges 300 miles from 
B. to A. 

5. Profit of shop-keeper on dress goods 
sold to the working-woman. 

Will anybody pretend that this is the best 
system that could be devised, oi* that it is 
anything but a needless and burdensome tax 
upon the producer and the consumer ? The 
employer of labor and the laborer have a 
common interest in eliminating the trader, 
and it is time that an effort in this direction 
should be made. The evil is a constantly 
growing one; its ordinary burdens are enor¬ 
mous, and instances of intolerable hardship 
endured by the least intelligent and very 
poor may easily be found. 

The wants of a community of live thou¬ 
sand workingmen, or say a population of 
twenty-five thousand souls, are with respect 
to their subsistence nearly uniform, and their 
consumption of the necessaries of life are 
nearly equal and regular. They want from 
day to day nearly the same things in nearly 
equal quantities. They are supplied by three 
hundred retail dealers in food, drink and 
clothing, each of whom pays rent, employs 
assistants, who with himself during half the 
time are idle, and buys from time to time 


118 


MAN AND LABOR. 


his little lot of goods from the commission 
merchant or jobber, getting it by rail and 
wagon at the expensive rates charged upon 
small shipments, and with a multiplied risk 
of depreciation, spoil and loss—all of which 
the customer must bear. It is not an ex¬ 
travagant estimate to place the tax upon the 
community for the support of those retail 
dealers in the common necessaries of life at 
half a million of dollars annually. If this 
tax could be dispensed with it would be 
equivalent to a permanent increase of twenty 
per centum in wages. 

The greater part of this tax would be 
abolished by employing a single mercantile 
agency for the community, under the man¬ 
agement of the community, and at the cost 
of merely necessary expenses. Not only the 
profit of the retail dealer, but one and often 
two other profits would be eliminated, 
wholly or in part, by purchases made directly 
from the producer, allowing him also a share 
of the trader's profits and resulting econo¬ 
mies. Tim difficulties in the way of effect¬ 
ing such an association are not necessarily 
insurmountable, and a beginning may be 
made when the workingman is disabused of 
the idea that the employer of labor is his 


MAN AND LABOR. 


119 


natural enemy, and that the trader is his 
best friend. 

The substitution of the commercial in 
place of the trading state cannot be effected 
at once, but must be gradually evolved from 
present conditions. It will require a certain 
training, the habit of association and of con¬ 
fidence in it, commercial honor, and the 
employment of capital and credit. Tt may 
probably be best for workingmen not to 
make the initial experiments alone and at 
their own risk, as the instances of success in 
commercial cooperation are few as com¬ 
pared with the failures. The natural order 
of progress in the productive industries 
would appear to be, first, the regulation of 
wages by a scale, next, profit-sharing, and 
finally, cooperation. It will be well to com¬ 
mence commercial cooperation with profit- 
sharing, which will induce confidence and 
the habit of association, and gradually edu¬ 
cate men up to cooperation pure and simple. 
The natural ally of the laborer in this, as in 
every other matter pertaining to his welfare, 
is his employer; and here and there instances 
may be found of employers and laborers 
Avho have understood this, and have acted 
upon it to their mutual advantage. 


120 


MAN AND LABOR. 


The truck system, as it is called in Eng¬ 
land, known as the company store system 
in the United States, is generally unpopular, 
and the cause of a great deal of heart-burn¬ 
ing and ugliness of spirit. Workingmen are 
easily made to believe that they are system¬ 
atically robbed at the employer’s store, and 
their dissatisfaction causes a chronic contro¬ 
versy in the state legislatures, where it takes 
the form of acts to enable laborers to repu¬ 
diate their contracts, and practically render 
themselves unworthy of credit—legislation 
which cannot be sustained by the courts if 
constitutional provisions are respected. 

It is unfortunately true that in many cases 
the family of the laborer will be better off, if 
the wife spends the wages for goods, than if 
they should be paid to the man “in law¬ 
ful money.” This consideration has little 
weight, for trade is not conducted on phil¬ 
anthropic principles, but for profit; and*the 
charity, if it is one, perpetuates the neces¬ 
sity for it. 

It is of no weight in the argument to 
point to particular instances where the em¬ 
ployer’s store is a real benefit to the work¬ 
ingman by giving him goods of good quality 
at fair prices, with full weights and meas- 


f 


MAX AXI) LABOR. 


121 


ures and honest accounts, dealing with his 
child in the same way that it would with 
himself; for where there is one such instance 
there may be a dozen others conducted upon 
the “pluck me” principle, and the evil 
remains that the laborer readily believes 
that he is robbed, whether he is or not; and 
opportunity is given to the small political 
demagogue, who is elected to the legisla¬ 
ture, to inflame the workingman’s sense of 
his wrongs, and lead him off on a wild-goose- 
chase after illegal, unconstitutional and im¬ 
possible remedies. 

The controversy seems to be endless. It 
tends to alienate employers and working¬ 
men, and to give more power to trade and 
less worth to real wages. Instead of 
endeavoring to suppress the traffic, it would 
be better to legalize it under the supervision 
of the State, upon conditions that would 
insure the best service to the laborer and 
also a participation in the profits. After 
persistent and exhaustive efforts to go in one 
direction, and finding no thoroughfare, it may 
be well to turn about and go the other way. 

A bill introduced into the Pennsylvania 
legislature at its last session,* but not acted 


By Mr. Sponsler, 


122 


MAN AND LABOR. 


on for want of time, suggests this change of 
front; and, without committing ourselves to 
its details, we regard it as fairly suggesting 
a new departure in state policy which 
deserves favorable consideration, and there¬ 
fore quote it as follows: 

AN ACT to authorize and regulate the keeping of 
cooperative stores, and to allow the payment of wages 
of labor in goods, wares and merchandise furnished 
by cooperative stores. 

Be it enacted, etc. Section 1. Employers of labor 
engaged in manufacturing or mining operations, work¬ 
ingmen engaged therein, or other persons, may carry on 
cooperative stores, and may supply goods, wares and 
merchandise to workingmen employed by them or 
others, on account of, and in payment of the wages of 
labor of workingmen dealing at such stores; Provided, 
That such mercantile business shall be conducted as fol 
lows: 

Sec. 2. Any person, firm, corporation or associa¬ 
tion, desiring to have and use the privileges conferred 
by this act shall file in the office of the Secretary of 
Internal Affairs a declaration setting forth the places in 
which such business is to be carried on, the name or 
names of the owners thereof and the name in which the 
business is to be conducted, and an agreement duly 
adopted and made a part of the articles of copartnership, 
corporation or association, to comply with the provisions 
of this act, which statement shall be verified by the oath 
or affirmation of the owner, or of the principal officer 
of the corporation or association making such state¬ 
ment. 

Sec. 3. An account shall be taken semi-annually of 


MAX AXD LABOR. 


123 


such mercantile business conducted during every six 
months prior to the first days of January and July in 
which shall be clearly set forth: 

1st. The amount of gross sales of merchandise. 

2d. The amount of gross profits made. 

3d. The amount of losses and bad debts. 

4th. The amounts severally paid for rents, salaries, 
freights and other necessary expenses. 

5tli. The amount of net profits. 

A copy of said accounts shall be verified by the oaths 
or affirmations of the owner, the principal book-keeper 
and the store-keeper or manager of such mercantile 
business or any two of them, and shall be posted in a 
public place in every store or building in which such 
mercantile business is carried on. 

Sec. 4. When the owner of such mercantile business 
is the owner of the buildings or property in which such 
mercantile business is carried on, the charge against 
such business for rent shall not exceed six per centum 
upon the cost or value of the property occupied and 
used in carrying on such business. 

Sec. 5. No wages or salary shall be charged against 
such business except for services actually rendered in 
carrying on the same. 

Sec. 0. The net profits gained in such mercantile 
business shall be divided and distributed as follows: 

1st. The owner shall retain out of said profits not 
more than three per centum upon the gross sales of mer¬ 
chandise. 

2d. Of the remainder of such net profits the owner 
shall retain not more than one half, and the residue shall 
be distributed to and among all purchasers of merchan¬ 
dise to the amount of five dollars or more during the 
period for which such account is stated, in a uniform 
percentage upon the amount of such purchases. Pay- 


124 


MAN AND LABOJ?. 

inent of such distributive shares may be made in cash or 
in merchandise, as the parties entitled to the same may 
elect, and all dividends which shall be unclaimed for a 
period of six months shall be added to the net profits of 
the next six months’ business and distributed as profits 
thereon, and such distribution shall forever bar any 
claim of a prior distributee of such share or shares. 

Sec. 7. The copy of accounts provided for in section 
three shall be piepared and posted within thirty days 
after the close of the six months business as aforesaid, 
and payment of distributive shares shall be due fifteen 
days thereafter. 

Sec. 8. Within sixty days after the close of six 
months business as aforesaid, a report shall be filed in 
the office of the Secretary of Internal Affairs, setting 
forth the facts following : 

1st. The name of the owner of such mercantile bus¬ 
iness and the places in which it is carried on. 

2d. The amount of gross sales of merchandise. 

3d. The amount of gross profits made. 

4th. The amounts severally paid out for rents, sal¬ 
aries, wages, freights and other necessary expenses. 

5th. The amount of net profits. 

6tli. The amount of net profits retained by the 
owner and the amount distributed to purchasers. 

Sec. 9. Said report shall state the number of sala¬ 
ried employes, and the number of workingmen receiving 
dividends, and if the owner of such mercantile business 
is the owner of the buildings or property in which it is 
carried on the cost or the value thereof shall be stated. 

Sec. 10. Said report shall be verified by the oaths or 
affirmations of the owner, the store-keeper or manager 
and the principal book-keeper, or any two of them, and 
any person making a false and fraudulent statement 
under oath or affirmation required by this act shall be 



MAN AND LA.BOR. 


125 


visited with the pains and penalties of perjury, and any 
owner who shall willfully neglect for a period of thirty 
days to post an account or make a report or statement 
required by this Act, or who shall knowingly insert or 
allow to be inserted, any false and fraudulent statement 
therein, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon con¬ 
viction shall pay a tine of not more than one thousand 
dollars and undergo an imprisonment of not more than 
six months, both or either at the discretion of the court. 

Sec. 11. All payments of wages made in goods, 
wares or merchandise supplied to workingmen dealing 
with cooperative stores conducted in accordance with 
this Act, upon the order of their employer or otherwise, 
shall be good and valid, and all laws and parts of laws 
regulating the payment of the wages of labor, in so far 
as they are inconsistent with the provisions of this Act, 
are hereby repealed. 

To understand this measure it is necessary 
to know that Pennsylvania, like other states, 
has a law prohibiting the payment of wages 
in anything but lawful money; and, unless 
an order or assignment has been given, 
where payment has been made in rent or 
fuel or goods, the workman may repudiate it, 
and collect the full amount of his wages by 
law. This is a premium upon dishonesty 
which few working men have cared to earn. 

The foregoing scheme has the usual 
features of such legislation, in creating new 
crimes and affixing severe penalties, but it 
was probably supposed that without these 


126 


MAN AND LABOR. 


it could not become a law. While it has the 
direct purpose of legitimating the payment 
of wages in goods, upon the basis of a par¬ 
ticipation in profits, there is nothing to pre¬ 
vent workingmen from organizing under it 
and obtaining all the profits themselves. 
Both systems are open, but we believe that 
the best beginning will be under the man- 
agement of the employers of labor, who will 
have an advantage of capital and .skill and 
credit, and that partnership of the working¬ 
men in the business will be profitable and 
lead to further advantages unaccompanied 
by risks, until men shall be educated up to 
the capability of taking sole conduct of the 
business. If a beginning can only be made 
in repealing the tax of the retail trade, we 
shall finally be rid of it altogether. 

The money which the workingman re¬ 
ceives as wages, or the nominal rate of his 
compensation, is worth to him only what it 
will bring, lie has had his mind fixed too 
much upon the dollars and cents, and too 
little upon what he would and could do with 
them. In this respect he is often ignorant 
and frequently helpless, and the most intelli¬ 
gent man is powerless and can effect nothing 
without association with his fellows. The 


MAN ANI) LABOR. 


127 


u labor reform” which is feasible, which 
would be permanent, and alike potent in bad 
times and in good times, and under high and 
low wages, is to give more worth to real 
wages by eliminating the trader, who has been 
aptly called u the tape-worm of the commu¬ 
nity.” 


REAL WAGES—INSTRUMENTS OE 
COMMERCE. 


The free and rapid exchange of various 
and complementary thoughts and things is 
essential to industrial and social progress. 
This true commerce is a motive to, and the 
object of, all industrial action; and it becomes 
more profitable as the instruments are im¬ 
proved and simplified, and as its machinery 
can be dispensed with by the closer associa¬ 
tion of the producer and the consumer who 
is also a producer, of man with man, in a 
highly organized and perfected community. 
Progress in this direction is a result of the 
conquest of nature through the development 
of science, which has enabled man to ad¬ 
vance from the ruder forces to the more sub¬ 
tle and effective powers, from those which 
cost much and do little labor, to those which 
cost little and do much labor, from the mus¬ 
cular power of man and animals, to wind and 
steam and electricity. With this improve¬ 
ment in the instruments of association, and 
consequent improvement in society, corn- 
128 




MAX AND LABOR. 


120 


merce is able to employ, in a constantly in¬ 
creasing proportion, forces that are purely 
metaphysical, as confidence, honor and credit, 
which are more potent in producing plenty 
than all other powers used by man. 

As an instrument of commerce coin is 
more costly and less efficient than paper, 
and infinitely more efficient still are the 
various forms of credit. Money is a motor, 
and this country wisely chooses the kind 
that is least costly and most efficient, instead 
of adopting the stupid theories of the free- 
trade school of finance, which insists upon 
our using the motor which is most costly 
and least efficient. Coin is their fetich, and, 
as gold happens now to be more costly than 
silver, they predict horrible things for us if 
we do not use gold exclusively. They would 
have a silver craze instead of a gold craze, if 
silver were now more costly than gold, as it 
has been in the past. As an instrument of 
commerce, coin has such relation to paper, as 
the ox-cart has to the railway car. “ Your 
railway cars are very well,” say the bullion - 
ists, “ but you must limit their issue, and 
above all things you must be careful to have 
in reserve their exact equivalent in carts.” 

The first steps in the substitution of new 
9 


130 


MAN AND LABOR. 


instruments of commerce for the old, and in 
the control of new powers for its service, are 
the most difficult. The man who predicted 
that a turnpike road would he made over 
the Alleghany mountains was regarded as 
insane by his neighbors. From the pack- 
horse to the Conestoga wagon was a long 
step, but how trivial as compared with the 
stride to the steam car! 

In mental commerce the exchange of infor¬ 
mation and ideas, the communication of 
wishes and news, the messenger who could 
only be used by the rich and great was sup¬ 
planted by the government post employing 
animal and steam power; and the march of 
improvement culminated in the use of the 
most rapid and imponderable force in nature 
in the telegraph and telephone. Time and 
space are no longer impediments to the com¬ 
merce in ideas. 

Every advance in this control of the pow¬ 
ers of nature achieved by science, lias been a 
benefit to the laborer, and has added to his 
real wages. The instruments of commerce— 
money and the means of communication and 
transportation—have been so improved that 
they are capable of the highest service, but 
it is questioned whether their management 


MAN AND LABOR. 


131 


is such as to render the best service, or even 
adequate service to the community. Upon 
this subject popular notions are mainly 
wrong, and this is unfortunate, as very grave 
matters may be decided at any time by a 
popular vote, and probably in the wrong way. 

The Greenback party combines elements 
of the practical, grotesque, and pathetic. 
We probably owe to it the inestimable bene¬ 
fit of the preservation of the legal tender 
currency, and there is sufficient reason for 
its existence as long as the bullionists, who 
are equally grotesque and much more dan¬ 
gerous, continue to be formidable. 

The Greenback party was right in defend¬ 
ing the legal tender currency; it is wrong in 
assailing tne national banking system, in 
which there is now perfect freedom and no 
taint of monopoly. The objection to the 
national banking system that it is unduly 
profitable is no longer valid. It is not 
profitable enough to preclude the growth of 
private banking, which has its peculiar 
attractions. The restrictions upon the man¬ 
agement of the national banks, all of which 
are wise, and the governmental inspection 
to which they are subjected, are obnoxious 
to the financial speculators who obtain the 


132 


MAN AND LABOR. 


money of the credulous, by hiring a room 
and putting up the word “ Bank ” in big gilt 
letters over the door. 

Banks are indispensable agencies of com¬ 
merce, and as a choice between national 
banks under the present system, state banks 
under any system, and private banks, the 
national banks should be unhesitatingly pre¬ 
ferred. It is supposed by the advocates of 
an exclusive legal tender currency, that if the 
national banking system is suffered to ex¬ 
pire, of which there is danger, or if it is 
abolished as they propose, private banks of 
discount and deposit, or state banks, will con¬ 
tinue the business with a greenback currency. 
They should not deceive themselves State 
banks will be banks of issue, and the govern¬ 
ment notes will have to go. We shall have 
the old vicious system back upon us with re¬ 
doubled strength, the character of the cur¬ 
rency will depend upon the jobbing that can 
be effectively employed in the legislatures 
of thirty-eight states; and no man can safely 
take a note without searching through an 
old-fashioned counterfeit detector, swollen to 
the dimensions of Webster’s dictionary, to 
find if it is genuine or not, or if the bank is 
broken, or what the discount upon its circu- 


MAX AND LABOR. 


133 


lating notes may be. One of the heaviest 
taxes upon the people in the days before the 
war was the cost of converting uncurrent 
money into bankable funds. As an instru¬ 
ment of commerce this old system is com¬ 
parable to a line of transportation which 
requires change of cars and trans-shipment 
of freight at the end of every hundred miles. 
There would be plenty of profit in it for 
bankers and brokers, all of which would be 
a tax upon workingmen, reducing by so much 
their real wages. The crusade against the 
national banks on the part of workingmen’s 
associations is a mistake, for this system and 
the legal tender currency will most certainly 
go down together. It is simply absurd to 
suppose that state banks will not be banks 
of issue. 

Why do not workingmen- engage in bank¬ 
ing under the national banking laws ? There 
is nothing to prevent it, they have ample 
means for the purpose; and there are instan¬ 
ces of a waste of wages, in an ill-advised and 
unsuccessful strike, which would have foun¬ 
ded more than one bank. They need a wise 
leader to do for them what Herman Schultze 
has done for the workingmen of Germany; 
but they will not find him among their pro- 


MAN AND LABOR. 


134 

fessional friends, the small politician, the 
saloonkeeper, and the retail dealer, nor is he 
likely to be developed from the leadership of 
trade and labor unions. 

The railroad question deserves more 
extended discussion than can be given 
to it here. The efforts to regulate carrying- 
companies by law has a large history in this 
country, and a larger history abroad. There 
are states in which controversy is at an end, 
there are others in which the agitation is at 
its height; and good, ignorant men in state 
legislatures are busy devising impossible rem¬ 
edies for imaginary wrongs, while political 
conventions resolve in favor of measures 
which experiments have shown to be useless 
or injurious. A legislative device, fully tried 
and finally discarded years ago, is taken up 
with zeal by reformers who are ignorant of 
current facts, and know nothing of history; 
and the simply good people will tolerate no 
opposition to it, though they do not pretend 
to understand it, for the simply good people 
will accept almost anything in the name of 
reform. 

Certain conclusions, drawn from a patient 
and disinterested study of the whole subject, 
may be stated, leaving the student to look 


MAX AND LABOR. 


135 


up the facts, which are so easily accessible 
that ignorance of them, especially upon the 
part of political leaders and legislators, is 
disgraceful. 

State operation of railroads is a failure. 
It has been tried in Europe in various forms, 
and it has neither improved the service nor 
reduced the cost. The state of Pennsylvania 
had experience in the matter, of which there 
is no history, simply for the reason that any¬ 
body acquainted with the facts, or some part 
of the fiagrancy of her railroad management, 
must have been particeps cr[minis, and would 
not dare to tell what he knows. 

The fixing of inflexible and uniform rates 
of freight by law has been fully tried, and 
necessarily abandoned. It is a stupidity 
for the recurrence of which there is no ex¬ 
cuse. 

The establishment of maximum rates of 
freight has little utility, as experience shows 
that they are soon left standing out like a 
high water mark on a receding stream. 

The railroad system of the United States, 
taken as a whole, is the best in the world. 
It performs the largest service at the least 
cost, and improvement in this respect has 
not been owing to legal control, and has 


130 


MAN AND LABOR. 


been greatest where there has been least in¬ 
terference on the part of the state. 

The carriage of freight lias been cheapened 
faster and farther in this country than else¬ 
where. It has been nearly uniformly pro¬ 
gressive year by year for the last fifteen 
years, and has been concurrent with great 
improvement in the service rendered. Rates 
for the entire traffic are nearly one-half less 
than they were fifteen years ago; and there 
cannot be further reduction, because the 
charges are and have been too low to keep 
the business alive and solvent. The situation 
is most injurious to the general business inter¬ 
ests of the country; and legislation should be 
invoked, not for the further destruction, but 
for the protection of railroad property. 

Applied to the commerce of the whole 
country, the reduction in freight rates is an 
enormous economy, and it is a cpiestion who 
has reaped most advantage from it. The 
question has been partially explored bv Ed¬ 
ward Atkinson in his admirable paper upon 
“ The Railway, the Farmer and the Public,” 
published in The Manufacturer's Gazette , 
and we use his facts for the purpose of dis¬ 
senting in part from his conclusions. We 
take his annual average prices in gold in the 


MAX AND LABOR. 


137 


New York market from 1869 tol8S3, inclu¬ 
sive, of eight staple articles—flour, grai®, 
meat, butter, wool, etc.—of the quantity of 
thirteen tons in all, and the charges during 
the same period for hauling this amount and 
kind of freight a. distance of a thousand 
miles. The following table shows the prices 
and average price, the freight charge at the 
opening and close of the period and the 
average rate and reduction in freight. 

Thirteen tons of mixed western products. 


Price in N. Y. 
1869 662 68 

1883 662 11 

Av. of 15 
years. 685 00 


Freight per ton 

per mile. Reduction. 

1.78 cents 

.91 cents 49 per cent 

1.13 cents 36 per cent 


Mr. Atkinson’s conclusion that the people 
have no good ground for complaint against 
the railroads is just. If the reduction of 
forty-nine per centum in the cost of carriage 
of commodities is applied to the entire freight 
traffic of the railroads at the present time, the 
result is so enormous as to be bewildering. 

We agree with Mr. Atkinson that it is an 
unparalleled economy, but his assumption 
that the farmers reaped the benefit of it is 
not satisfactory. Taking the New York 
prices as a guide, the consumers did not get 


138 


MAN AND LABOR. 


the benefit, but it does not follow that it 
*vent to the farmer in the West. 

It has been observed that a reduction of 
ten per centum in freight rates upon traffic 
from the Northwest never reaches the con¬ 
sumer, but is lost and absorbed by the way. 
How much of the large average saving dur¬ 
ing the foregoing period of fifteen years may 
have had a like history is worthy of inquiry. 
How much of it has gone to build up Chi 
cago and other cities with their elevators, 
stock-yards, boards of trade, dealers and 
brokers? If some wizard with a magical 
wand could transform into their original ele¬ 
ments, all the business blocks, town houses, 
and country seats, along the great trunk 
lines between the western grain fields and 
New York city, which have been built out 
of this traffic and are sustained by it, what 
mountains of grain and meat and provisions 
would affront the sky. The efforts of a 
multitude of traders, skilled in the art of 
buying cheap and selling dear, buying cheap 
from the producer and selling dear to the 
consumer, have clearly not benefited the 
consumer, that the producer has been largely 
•benefited bv their exertions we shall regard 
as doubtful until there is some proof of it. 


MAN ANI) LABOR. 


139 


Generally and broadly the railroads have 
.Tendered admirable service, at nearly the 
lowest possible rates, because they could not 
help it. The competition of the markets 
has been elfective where there was not com¬ 
petition with each other; and these great in¬ 
vestments have been subject to the law pre¬ 
vailing in all progressive communities under 
which capital constantly declines in value 
and increases in utility. The march of in¬ 
vention and improvement is a perpetual and 
irresistible confiscation of the value of the 
labors of the past, and a proportional incre¬ 
ment of power in the labor of the present 
and of worth in its real wages. 

The vices of railroad management are in¬ 
dividual and local, and they may be cured 
by such legislation as has been reached after 
painful and costly experiments in some of 
the states. Kansas may be cited as an ex¬ 
ample of perfect accord between railroad 
management and the people, effected by an 
intelligent board of state railroad commis- 
sioners, which investigates all complaints, 
and renders impartial decisions, which it lias 
no power to enforce, but which are always 
respected. To this extent legislation should 
be regarded as indispensable ; beyond this it 


140 


MAX AND LABOR. 


becomes an impediment to commerce, and, 
as experience has shown, defeats its own 
avowed ends. Hostility to railroads belongs 
to that degree of culture attained by the 
tribe of famishing savages, referred tp in a 
former chapter, who have not compassed the 
use of boats, and do all their fishing from 
the shore. 


COOPERATION. 


Discussion of the subject of wages leads 
to the conclusion that the division of product¬ 
ive forces into capitalist employers on the 
one side, and mere receivers of wages on the 
other, is not the best, nor a final organization 
of industry. It tends to place the relations 
of employers and employed upon a purely 
commercial basis, and to induce the idea 
that labor itself is a commodity which may 
be profitably purchased as cheaply as pos¬ 
sible. There is the difference between a man 
and a machine, that in the man, the will 
is the motive power; and there is hardly a 
case in which human forces purely are em¬ 
ployed, that good will would not mean an 
increase of productiveness. It is not alto¬ 
gether lacking now, but might be made more 
general and more potent. There is the 
broader consideration that there is the most 
intimate connection between good times and 
generally profitable business, and the con¬ 
suming power of workingmen. Reductions 
in wages are a commercial necessity when 
141 



142 


MAN ANt) labor. 


competition is unlimited, and they tend to 
intensify and prolong panics and periods of 
business depression. If foreign competition 
could be barred out, such depression might 
he instantly checked by a general advance 
in the wages of workingmen, an experiment 
that has never been tried because employers 
are not all willing to do it, and many of 
them are not able to do it. They depend 
upon the market from day to day; their ne¬ 
cessities and fears infect each other; and the 
• whole body of society becomes subject to a 
purely mental disease, which manifests itself 
in industrial stagnation or paralysis. Nobody 
is to blame for this because everybody is to 
blame; and during such periods there are 
immense losses of capital, employers are 
ruined, and workingmen are the worst suf¬ 
ferers. 

Looking a long way into the future we 
can see that the commercial and competitive 
organization of industry must be a failure, 
and there should be wise and timely efforts 
to place it on a better basis. That coopera¬ 
tion must be the ultimate issue of industrial 
strife is evident to every thoughtful student 
of the relations of capital and labor, and we 
believe it will come whenever men want it 


MAN AND LABOR. 


143 


and are fitted for it. It presupposes condi¬ 
tions which do not now exist—mutual confi¬ 
dence, respect for social order and for the 
rights of others and a desire for their wel¬ 
fare, and a settled and stable community. 
Men must begin to be neighbors before they 
can be partners, and their being partners 
will make them better neighbors. 

Success in mercantile cooperation argues 
nothing for the chances of success in indus¬ 
trial cooperation. The former lias its market 
provided for it, the latter lias a dependence 
upon “ the market of the world,” from which 
it must get all its rewards, and there are 
other difficulties which should be fully recog¬ 
nized. 

In the simpler sort of manufacturing enter¬ 
prises, in which the labor is nearly all of one 
degree of skill, and when the product is 
easily disposed of, cooperative experiments 
have been successful, but in attempting such 
business upon a large scale, workingmen 
would soon discover that what they have 
regarded as the profits of capital are really 
wages of superintendence, and that they are 
just as fairly earned as any other wages of 
labor. The skill that organizes and manages 
processes, and markets the product, watching 


144 


MAN AND LABOR. 


and suiting the market, and taking the risk 
of, and preventing loss upon the commercial 
side of the business, is as necessary to wages 
as to profits, and without it there would be 
neither wages nor profits. 

Tiie history of almost every important 
industrial establishment in this country 
shows its rise from a feeble origin to present 
greatness. Its beginning may have involved 
no larger control of moneyed capital than 
any group of skilled workmen could readily 
compass, but the one essential thing has 
been the mind of one man—the founder, 
and one or more successors trained under 
him. He contributed the faculty of organ¬ 
ization and control, the economy, energy 
and business sagacity, that made the enter¬ 
prise a success. The reward he received 
may have been large, but it was not more 
than the fruit of his toil. 

It may be said that the conditions of bus¬ 
iness are so greatly changed that such 
growth of an industry from a seed is no 
longer possible, and to a certain extent this 
is true, but it is true only of these processes 
which require a very large outlay of capital 
to make a beginning in them. As to these 
industries, cooperation in any form must 


MAN AND LABOR. 


145 

originate in agreements between employers 
and workingmen. 

There may be less reluctance on the part 
of employers to make such partnership 
arrangements than is supposed; the diffi¬ 
culties are real, and are entitled to respectful 
consideration. The proper basis for profit- 
sharing is not easily found, if it is to be 
established as a right and not merely al¬ 
lowed as a gratuity. If the risk is not to 
be all on one side a contingent or guaranty 
fund must lie accumulated. Provision must 
be made for keeping the invested capital un¬ 
impaired, and in some of the large primary 
processes in metallurgy this will require an 
outlay of not less than ten per centum per 
annum upon the amount of the investment. 
Upon these and other matters of like nature 
it would be necessary to have the assent of 
all the parties in interest, and there is a re¬ 
luctance to giving a voice in the business 
management, to a large number of partners 
who may not be business men. 

These difficulties will all be overcome,but 
not easily or soon; and it is not well to mis¬ 
lead men by making them believe that 
there is just at hand an industrial paradise 
that they may enter at once; that they have 
10 " 


146 


MAN AND LABOR. 


but to open the door, and that this would 
be easy if they could only put out of the 
way some evil minded guardian who bars 
the free approach. All the rewards of in¬ 
dustry must come out of the product, and 
eventually from the market, under condi 
tions of competition always trying, which 
it is proposed to make incalculable and 
universal through freedom of trade. Under 
such circumstances if participation in profits 
should be coupled with participation in 
losses, the risk would outweigh the advan¬ 
tages. 

There is a notable instance of successful 
industrial cooperation, in the organization 
of industry at the iron works of Godin 
Co., at Guise in France. M. Godin con¬ 
ceived the idea of erecting what he justly 
calls a social palace, as a dwelling for his 
workmen, and it proved to be a good invest¬ 
ment for his capital, while it made his 
employes practically a single family. They 
are as well lodged as they could desire, in a 
building especially planned for the purpose, 
supplied with every requisite of health and 
comfort, and with the means of social 
amusements and enjoyments. They easily 
support nurseries and schools, and make 


MAN ANI) LABOR. 


147 


provision for medical attention and care in 
sickness, and the economies of their whole¬ 
some mode of living enables them to accum¬ 
ulate capital, which they are investing in the 
business under a scheme which provides for 
the repairs of plant, pa} r s fair wages of 
management, and makes such dividends to 
capital and labor that the workmen are 
gradually acquiring ownership of the prop¬ 
erty. 

M. Godin enjoyed the personal disfavor of 
the late Napoleon III., and survived it to at¬ 
tain a more worthy and lasting distinction 
than his imperial enemy ; but one wonders in 
reading of his achievements, if the social 
elements which made his success possible 
could be found anywhere except in France. 
The French have a genius for organization 
and society; they are loyal to intelligent 
leadership, they are attached to place and 
are home-keeping, and they understand all 
the small economies of life, and are .not 
ashamed to practice them. The hoarding 
instinct is strong in them, and the accumula¬ 
tions of capital by French working people 
have at times been very serviceable to their 
country. 

Profit-sharing as a gratuity has been sue-' 


148 


MAN AND LABOR. 


cessful in Parisian industries, and it has been 
tried to some extent in England; but we 
know of no important experiments with it 
in this country. Mining would seem to be 
very well suited to it, as it is a simple pro¬ 
cess, and has always a single product, and 
especially as experiments with competitive 
cheap labor have had most unsatisfactory 
results. 

The opportunity for giving profit-sharing 
legal status, and a wide and beneficent sphere 
of action, has been lost through lack of 
foresight, as it might have been easily intro¬ 
duced through the laws authorizing the 
organization of corporations. Such a pre¬ 
vision, if wisely framed, would have been 
generally accepted, especially if coupled with 
exemption from taxation, which has been 
unduly burdensome, and under its operation 
the industrial world would have presented 
an aspect widely different from what we see 
today. This easy way is now closed, and 
we are left to the voluntary efforts of em¬ 
ployers and workingmen which may be 
looked for as intelligence advances, and 
when selfishness and lawlessness are replaced 
by respect for the rights of others and a 
desire for their welfare. 


MAN AND LABOR. 


149 


It is usual to propose such reorganization 
of industry as we have discussed, as a rem¬ 
edy for some wrong done to labor. This is 
a narrow and false view of the matter; and 
the true ground upon which the argument 
for it must rest, is that it will increase the 
productiveness of labor. Of this we have no 
doubt, and it alone must be depended upon 
to insure success. To make labor attractive 
by giving every laborer an interest in the 
general result, must induce better effort, 
greater economy and rapidity of production, 
and more wealth for all. 


FLUIDITY OF LABOR EXAMINED. 


The theory of the beneficence of universal 
competition cannot be maintained without 
the assumption that human labor has a cer¬ 
tain fluid quality which it does not possess. 
It is pent in by natural and artificial barriers, 
which are impassable, or can only be over¬ 
come by enormous suffering and loss. It is 
alleged that the system under which one- 
fourth of the mass of American working- 
people find employment is non-natural; that 
their sole defense in the international trade 
combat in which they are engaged, the 
tariff wall, should be removed; and that 
no harm would be done to them or to the 
country if their productive industries should 
be obliterated by an overwhelming invasion 
of foreign commodities. The country would 
not lose their labor, for it would be em¬ 
ployed in other industries, which are neces¬ 
sarily more profitable because they do not 
require artificial means of support. This 
assumption is vital, and we are surprised 
that it has so long passed without serious 
150 



MAX AXD LABOR. 


151 

question.* The fluidity of commodities, 
always great, lias been enormously increased 
by improvements in transportation, and free 
trade in them can exert an irresistible level¬ 
ing and often destructive force. It is abso¬ 
lutely necessary to the theory of its benefi¬ 
cence under all circumstances that there 
should be a corresponding fluidity of labor, 
or, otherwise, the benefit to a few resulting 
from the comparatively slight cheapening of 
commodities needed to exercise a destruc¬ 
tive power, must be greatly out weighed by 
the compulsory idleness of large numbers of 
our own people. We are told that nothing 
of this kind can occur; that in accordance 
with a natural and irresistible law, labor will 
flow into other and more profitable channels, 
the laborer will find a new and better place 
for his efforts; there will be a gain to the 
workingmen and to the country. One of 
our free-trade professors says: u Persons go 
to the places which offer an arena for their 
talents. They do not sit still and say ‘ let 
us make an arena here.’ As for the varied 
field for enterprise, the world opens that, 

* This was written before Henry M. Hoyt published “ Pro¬ 
tection vs. Free Trade,” in which this assumption is chal¬ 
lenged after the fashion in which Ivanhoe summoned Brian 
tie Bois Gilbert to the combat a la outrance , 



152 


MAN AND LABOK. 


and our enterprises seek the place of advan¬ 
tage.” Adaip Smith’s observations led him 
to a different conclusion. Remarking that 
the price of common labor in London was 
eighteen pence a day, and that a few miles 
distant it fell to fourteen and fifteen pence, 
that ten pence was the price in Edinburgh, 
and that a few miles distant it fell to eight 
pence, and that this difference in price was 
not sufficient to transport a man from one 
parish to another, he says: “After all that 
has been said of the levity and inconstancy 
of human nature, it appears evidently from 
experience that a man is, of all sorts of lug¬ 
gage, the most difficult to be transported.” 
Dr. Smith’s illustration, though forcible, is 
comparatively weak, for it involves nothing 
but a change of place. The difficulty Avould 
be practically insurmountable if it involved 
change of occupation as well. 

It might be sufficient to say that the other 
and more profitable industries, which could 
absorb an overflow of labor defeated by free 
trade, do not exist in this country—perhaps 
not anywhere ; but if they did there would 
be no such overflow. There are barriers 
which the cosmopolitan college professor has 
overlooked in his world-wide views, barriers 


MAN AND LABOR. 


153 


in the nature of the industries and other bar¬ 
riers in human nature itself. 

It will probably be asserted that the 
stream of immigration into the United States, 
and the flow of population within the 
country, shows all the mobility of labor that 
could be claimed, or that is required. If we 
could ascertain the amount of pressure 
brought to bear upon the mass of immi¬ 
grants to move them from their homes, we 
would find it to be enormous, and that but 
a small percentage of the population enduring 
it have yielded to it. There are people who 
cannot be tempted or driven from their 
homes, as witness the French, of whom we 
have but few in this country. Ireland has 
contributed to us the largest number in pro¬ 
portion to her means, and the deportation 
of the Irish people is one of the darkest pages 
of history. If it is a natural and proper re¬ 
sult of economic laws; who can make an 
estimate of its agonies and waste and loss to 
Ireland and the Irish ? Entrance into “ the 
varied field of enterprise which the world 
opens,” has been purchased by the Irish at a 
price which we would not care to pay. When 
the choice is to go, or to stay and starve and 
die, some will go and others will stay and die. 


154 


MAN AND LABOR. 


The movement of population within a 
country argues nothing as to its mobility be¬ 
yond the boundary lines, nor may it afford 
any evidence of the fluidity of labor in the 

e. «/ 

sense in which it is claimed. Migration 
westward is but a transient phase of our 
national life, it is not profitable to encourage 
it, and it is not at all probable that it could 
have larger operation under any circum¬ 
stances, as the moment it should become 
compulsory, it would be impossible. 

Of the impediments to the transportation 
of u human luggage,'' the chief is its desire 
to stay and unwillingness to go. There is a 
certain fixedness of population that can be 
counted upon, and it does not depend upon 
either the pleasantness or the profit of its 
situation. The instinct of attachment to 
place is found in man as in the other animals. 
With the lower animals it determines their 
habitat, and it lias a corresponding function 
in man. Some of the animals have this in¬ 
stinct so strong as to be irresistible, while in 
others it is almost non-existent, a difference 
which is seen in the domestic animals which 
frequent the house and which are nearest to 
man. 

Man being the sum of the animals, as 


MAN AND LABOR. 


155 


well as something more, has the instinct of 
attachment to place; and taking men in the 
mass, this innate feeling is an element of 
patriotism and one of the foundations of 
nationality. It is weak in some men and 
strong in others, and peoples differ in this re¬ 
spect, as in other traits of character; there 
are nomadic races that lack this essential 
element in the making of a nation. 

Love of country is not an intelligent com¬ 
parison of the advantages and disadvantages 
■of climate, soil and political institutions ; it 
is not attachment to the person of the sover¬ 
eign, or to constitutional principles, or the 
form of government; it is something much 
simpler and homelier. Those who feel it 
most are least likely to analyze it; it is sim¬ 
ply love of place, that may be, and often is, 
inversely in proportion to the agreeableness 
or economic profitableness of its object. Men 
do not all seek the finest climate and richest 
soils ; they cling to the barren and inhospit¬ 
able region of their birth, and if driven from 
it they long to return to it; indeed, they 
sometimes pine and die in exile. 

Man is attached to the soil as the animals 
are; not so absolutely, yet so generally as to 
give permanence to communities, and to per- 


150 


MAN AND LABOK. 


petuate original distributions of the human 
race. The community is itself a growth of 
the soil; it can hardly be said to exist where 
the inhabitants have not become rooted like 
its trees, and like them finding death in 
severance. IIow strong this attachment to 
place is in general, is inconceivable to the 
mentally deformed philosopher in whom it 
is naturally deficient, and it will have no 
place in a system evolved from his own con¬ 
sciousness. It is a dumb emotion, that is ex¬ 
pressed here and there in a shred of song 
like that of the exile of Erin, like the lam¬ 
entation of the captive Jews, “ By the rivers 
of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept 
when we remembered Zion.” 

The assertion that men seek the arena for 
their talents or their labors is not true. They 
do not run about the globe to find their 
place, but in general it is made for them by 
their birth. There they prefer to remain, 
and it is a calamity that drives them forth 
from it. That industries may change their 
seat is true, and there may be corresponding 
changes in population, but such changes if 
radical and sudden must be accompanied by 
great misery. 

If there is such a thing as a natural right, 


MAN AND LABOR. 


157 


it should be the right of a people to live in 
their own country. A governmental policy 
which makes this impossible is accursed of 
God and man. 

The man of the soil, the natural man, is 
more wisely planned than the economic man. 
AVe prefer him as a neighbor and a citizen, 
and in fact we cannot do without him. The 
complacency with which the free traders 
offer this man the alternatives of starvation 
or exile, moves our indignation. His instinct¬ 
ive desire to stay is one of the elements of 
human nature heretofore overlooked. Among 
the many impediments to the fluidity of 
labor, this instinct deserves recognition, and 
it must be given a place in the science of 
Political Economy. 


PRIVATE PROPERTY-CHATTELS. 


The right of private property is implied in 
every proposition relating to work and 
wages. The first title to anything is labor 
expended upon it, or in obtaining it, and the 
laborer has a right to the entire fruit of his 
toil. His enjoyment of this title would be 
incomplete, often useless, if he could not con¬ 
fer it upon others. The producer of fish 
may exchange his surplus for game, and the 
fisherman and hunter thus mutually give 
title to each other. The things thus ex¬ 
changed once may be exchanged again and 
again, until the source of the original title is 
lost, and inquiry respecting it would be 
fruitless. It is not necssary that there 
should be such inquiry, for common instinct 
and immemorial and universal custom o-ive 
assent to the principle of municipal law, that 
possession of personal chattels is primafacie 
evidence of ownership. Whether the pos¬ 
sessor of a chattel has a good title or not is 
no concern of mine. I cannot question it 
unless the thing has been wrongfully taken 
158 



MAN AND LABOR. 


159 


from me. It is not mine, and if I take it 
from the possessor for my own use without 
his consent, it is theft, and if I use violence, 
it is robbery. No race of men has been dis¬ 
covered that did not have sense of this natu¬ 
ral law, and it is found in the lower animals. 
They assert the rights of ownership, and ex¬ 
hibit signs of culpability when they have 
taken what does not belong to them. 

The natural right of private property has 
certainly this extent, because instinctive rec¬ 
ognition of it is a complete in vesture, it re¬ 
quires no evidence. Ownership of chattels 
which are not, and never have been, in pos¬ 
session, is a matter of title, and there is such 
right to them as is accorded by usage or 
municipal law. The title that in this case 
the state does give, must be respected by 
everybody, as this is an obligation of citizen¬ 
ship. What title the state should give is a 
matter of opinion; everybody has a right to 
discuss it; the question being, what is for 
the public good, for the public good is the 
supreme law. 

The proposition to limit a man’s possessions 
so that he shall not acquire more than a cer¬ 
tain amount of property, is commonly dis¬ 
cussed in Europe, and begins to be talked of 


160 


MAN AND LABOR. 


in this country, partly as as a result of the 
bad taste of a pseudo-economical writer, in 
denouncing by name certain American rich 
men. The limit fixed by a French socialistic 
society is an income of three hundred dollars 
a year; if a man has more than this, he is a* 
capitalist, u away with him to the lamp-post.” 

To limit a man’s labors or their proper 
rewards, is an invasion of natural rights, the 
line cannot be drawn anywhere ; it is as ab¬ 
surd and useless to place it at a million dol¬ 
lars as at three hundred dollars, and it is not 
required or justified by any consideration of 
the public good, nor could it be enforced. If it 
were a debatable quest ion we should say that 
the public good demanded that every man 
should have the right to possess all that 
through the free exercise of his faculties he is 
able to honestly acquire, this incentive to in¬ 
dustry, thrift, and enterprises small and great, 
being absolutely necessary to draw out all his 
powers. The laborer in every legitimate field 
of operation and invention should have the 
entire fruit of his toil. This law of freedom is 
beneficent; and it will not be abrogated be¬ 
cause a disreputable millionaire or two may 
have acquired wealth by practices which 
barely escape being criminal. 


MAN AND LABOR. 161 

In stating the natural law of property we 
have not defined the principles of human na¬ 
ture from which it arises. The instinct to 
acquire, to hoard, is the basis of it, and that 
this propensity is innate will hardly be ques¬ 
tioned. Tt is not a result of education or 
proportioned to necessities; its vagaries and 
diseases are illustrated in collections of use¬ 
less things, and in the miser and kleptoma¬ 
niac, and it has peculiar and striking mani¬ 
festations in the lower animals. It is an 
anti-communal force the strength of which 
has not been gauged by the socialists. 

With man the claim of mine implies the 
recognition of thine, not as a result of 
ratiocination but from an instinctive sense of 
justice. The balance is maintained safely in 
the mass of mankind by the strength of this 
superior sentiment; and if property had not 
this natural protection, it could never have 
acquired, nor would it now have, the safe¬ 
guard of municipal law. In any conflict 
between a selfish propensity and a social 
sentiment, however men may act, they in¬ 
stinctively feel that the latter is of the higher 
authority; and upon this truth is based every 
effort, and every hope, for the improvement 
of society. Underlying usages, customs and 
11 


162 


MAN AND LABOR. 


positive laws regulating rights of property, 
is this natural sense of justice, which, in the 
absence of legislation, will make a code of 
its own. 

Our definition of the rights of property, 
reached thus directly and simply, is in ac¬ 
cord with the conclusions of Mr. Mill, who 
says, “ nothing is implied in property, but the 
right of each to his own faculties, to what 
he can produce by them, and to whatever he 
can get for them in a fair market, together 
with his right to give this to any other per¬ 
son if he chooses, and the right of that other 
to receive and enjoy it.” 

Going along with Mr. Mill thus far we 
must immediately part company, for he pro¬ 
ceeds to say, “it follows, therefore, that al¬ 
though the right of bequest or gift after 
death forms part of the idea of private prop¬ 
erty, the right of inheritance as distinguished 
from bequest does not,” and he argues that 
as children have no inherent right to the pos¬ 
sessions of their ancestors, the property of 
intestates might, and should be, confiscated 
for public uses. We think he lias missed 
the point that a natural right must be one 
of which there is full investure by natural 
recognition, the claimant being required to 


MAN AND LABOR. 


163 


show no title other than the naked posses¬ 
sion, and that when we get beyond this the 
right is not natural but conventional, and a 
creature of custom or law. Disposition of 
property by will is artificial, and a matter 
of evidence to be made out in some form 
prescribed by law; it was seldom recognized in 
a primitive state of society, while succession 
by inheritance has been universally recog¬ 
nized ; and to the extent that it makes right¬ 
ful possession co-extensive with ownership, 
it is in accordance with natural law. 

That Mr. Mill should discuss the rights of 
children only in this connection is curious. 
He does not mention the wife at all; and this 
makes it clear that he had in his mind only 
the conventional or legal title, and not “ the 
idea of private property ” or natural right. 
AYe have to do with the family of civilization, 
and not with that of those savages among 
whom the wife cannot own property because 
she is herself a chattel. Confiscation of the 
property of intestates is not such a simple 
matter when the rights of the wife are re¬ 
garded. That the title to the property of 
the family of which the husband and the 
wife are in joint possession, and which con¬ 
sists of their joint earnings and savings, 


MAN AND LABOR. 


164 

should be in the man only, is a lingering 
remnant of the slavery of women. The 
emancipation of women proceeds but slowly ; 
in many states she is the victim of various 
forms of injustice, and she is generally 
robbed under the operation of intestate laws. 
This is not intentional, for men are ignorant 
of the law of wills and inheritances; to make 
provision for the family .is one of their 
strongest incentives to industry and thrift; 
bnt they have a vague idea that the law 
makes a good enough will, which is a great 
mistake. 

The property of the family, consisting of 
the joint earnings and savings of the man 
and wife, acquired during marriage and being 
in their joint possession, should be recog¬ 
nized and defined as a conjugal estate, which 
upon the death of either should go to the 
survivor. At present this right of survivor¬ 
ship is in the husband, and it is in accord¬ 
ance with the natural law of property to 
give it also to the wife. Her control of it 
will be of more benefit to society than if, in 
accordance with Mr. Mills’ theory, it should 
be confiscated by the state, and distributed 
to charities by an appropriation bill. 

The principles of human nature in which 


MAN AND LAIiOK. 


1 ()5 

property in things originates, consist of a 
propensity common to man and to the other 
animals, as essentially a part of the animal 
and human nature as the instinct to take 
food, and of a sentiment, traces of which 
may be found in the animals, which is per¬ 
fected in man. 

The propensity to acquire, to hoard, neces¬ 
sarily implies an object and a wholesome 
use, but the magpie and the miser show 
that there is enjoyment in its exercise, irre¬ 
spective of any useful object or end. This 
is in accordance with the general law that 
nature attaches pleasure to the exercise of 
any innate propensity which is necessary 
to the preservation of the race; and this pro¬ 
pensity we hold to be clearly of such quality. 

Neither men nor animals make hoards 
because they have reasoned it out and dis¬ 
covered that it is a wise provision for winter 
or old age, or a means of enjoyment, or for 
the public good. They do it because they 
have the instinct to do it; and it concerns 
the preservation and tends to the progress 
of society, that the means of subsistence, the 
acquisition of capital, and the necessary 
preparation for advancement in the arts and 
the endowment of charities, do not depend 


MAX AX I) LABOK. 


ICO 


wholly upon the forethought and intelligence 
of men, that back of forethought and intelli¬ 
gence, there is this common, instinctive, and 
irresistible force. It is well if the man who 
has no love of labor for its own sake shall 
have the love of gain, and desirable that the 
hoarding instinct, should be strong enough 
to keep the world supplied with the means 
of subsistence for its inhabitants, for at least 
a year, which is all it can do at present. 

It will be observed that we have confined 
the natural right of property within some¬ 
what narrow limits, in extending it only to 
things in the possession of the owner. By 
possession we do not mean what he has upon 
his person or can hold in his hands, but 
such possession as is consistent with enjoy¬ 
ment and control, in accordance with the 
nature of the property. There are artificial 
rights of property which have been created 
and may be abrogated by law. 

The laws of inheritance have been ^ener- 
ally invasions of natural rights ; they have 
not been cleared from feudal customs, and 
some of the usages of slavery survive in 
them. They should be so molded as to do 
justice to women, and this being effected, 
limitation upon the power of bequest would 


MAN AND LABOR. 167 

be necessary arid proper. The division by 
distribution of estates is in accordance with 
natural law, and it is for the good of society. 

Collateral inheritances are not supported 
by any natural or equitable right; and it 
might be well, if wise and honest adminis¬ 
tration of a fund derived from this source 
could be devised, to take a liberal percentage 
of such estates for the use of the community. 
It should not be given to the state or appro¬ 
priated to charities. State charities on a 
large scale would be just as demoralizing 
now as they have been in the past, and they 
would probably end in imperial despotism. 

There are many reforms in the laws which 
are desirable, such as the abolition of harsh 
and useless feudal principles of the common 
law in titles*, and inheritances ; the supersed- 
ure of bands of predatory lawyers and petty 
magistrates by courts of conciliation, simple 
and speedy settlement of estates, abolition 
of trusts except to secure loans and for char¬ 
itable uses, the granting to new corporations 
of all the powers possessed by any old one, 
thus destroying monopoly, recognition and 
encouragement of voluntary associations, 
and the protection of home labor against 
foreign competition. These are matters 


168 


MAN AND LABOR. 


which may be accomplished. As to private 
property; the thing that has been will be. 
It is a long history to recount the struggles 
through which this natural right, essentially 
a right of labor, secured the protection of 
equal laws. The theorists-who would abol¬ 
ish it must overthrow civilization, which is 
reached and maintained by diversification of 
employments and inequality of rewards. 
They propose a brief saturnalia or a perma¬ 
nent descent to barbarism. 


PROPERTY IN LAND. 


There are a great many theories afloat in 
regard to property in land. It is held that 
it is all wrong and should be abolished, that 
the state should be the only land owner, that 
rents should be confiscated, that there should 
be a life interest only in the possessor, that 
the land should be taken from landlords and 
given to their tenants. The workingmen 
of America, many of whom are land owners, 
have been recently told what they never sus¬ 
pected, that their vices and misery which 
are taken for granted, were a result of the 
right of property in land, that it would be 
useless for them to be industrious or thrifty 
or temperate or virtuous, for they are neces¬ 
sarily ruined by rent, that rent robbed and 
degraded them, and that they must continue 
to descend to a meaner place with constantly 
increasing wretchedness, unless property in 
land is abolished, or what is suggested as an 
equivalent, unless rents are confiscated. 

The instinct of acquisition—the desire to 
own and possess, has been directed to land 
169 


170 


MAN AND LABOR. 


as an object with constant force; it lias had 
much to do with political history, and has 
played a large part in the movement of pop¬ 
ulations and the constitution and admixture 
of races. History discloses the largest illus¬ 
trations of various systems of land tenures 
in different forms of individual, communal, 
aristocratic and state ownership, so that 
nothing new can be suggested, and there 
are no untried experiments. Now as here¬ 
tofore, the tiller of the soil has a burning 
desire to become the owner of the soil; a 
natural aspiration consistent with its best 
uses for the individual and for society. 

Recognizing labor as the origin of the 
right of property, it is said by Mr. Mill and 
others, that there can be no natural right of 
property in land, because no man made the 
land. No man made the earth, but labor 
has been and is so mixed with it, that it 
gives a title which natural justice and pub¬ 
lic policy must respect. The pioneer who 
by the life long labors of himself and family 
has converted a portion of wilderness into a 
fertile farm, has a natural right to its own¬ 
ership. It was a piece of earth, he has 
made it land. 

There are no “ original and indestructible 


MAN AND LABOR. 


171 


powers of fertility in the soil.” As to all its 
productive properties land is made by labor. 
The earth is simply the raw material of a 
machine which man must fashion for use, 
and he must be perpetually re-making it. 
Agriculture is an endless struggle with 
nature, in which the original elements of 
fertility in the soil count for but little in 
helpfulness; they are more than counter¬ 
balanced by the adverse forces which go 
along with them—the numerous and formid¬ 
able enemies which must be encountered in 
subduing the richest soils, a labor which is 
nowhere fully accomplished. The history 
of the conquest of land in the United States 
discloses the largest courage, the hardest 
toil, and such thrift and vigor as have been 
displayed in no other industry. The same 
qualities put forth in any other work would 
have won much larger wealth; and nobody 
needs to be in want of land, or of anything 
else, who possesses and will use them. 

To talk about land as if it were a free gift 
of nature, which, like light and air, should 
belong to everybody and might be used by 
anybody, is nonsense. The cultivated land 
of the country has cost in labor, over and 
above its returns, more than it would sell 


172 


MAN AND LABOR. 


for, if the labor is rated upon the basis of 
wages in the other industries. The right of 
ownership of land in this country, lias within 
our own observation and memory, its origin 
in labor expended upon the land, which 
gives as complete and just a title to it as 
there can be to anything. Some of the 
pioneers still live, and we are acquainted 
with their children. It is not as if we were 
obliged to explore the obscure records of 
past centuries for the source of titles which 
originated in, and were perpetuated by, the 
violation of natural rights, as is the case in 
other countries, for in our history the facts 
are of today and yesterday; and it is not 
necessary to justify the land tenures of 
England and Ireland, for they do not meas¬ 
ure the rights of the American pioneer or first 
purchaser, and those who hold under him. 

Tried by any test the title of the American 
farmer is a good one ; and the man who has 
a good title cannot be said to have proper 
enjoyment of it, unless he can confer it 
upon others. Sale or exchange of lands is a 
necessary incident of ownership; and that 
mere possession should be a sufficient barrier 
against the trespasser, is consistent with 
natural justice and the peace of society. 


MAN AND LABOR. 


173 


The founders of the American common¬ 
wealth did not deem it possible that private 
property could be taken for private use, 
except as a crime punishable under the law ; 
and they provided that private property 
should not be taken for public use without 
just compensation. This provision of the 
bill of rights was regarded as one of the 
essential safeguards of liberty. 

We come to the same conclusion with 
respect to property in land as in other things, 
but there is the natural difference that indi¬ 
vidual ownership of land must be subject to 
public uses. Whenever an individual right 
and a social right are clearly in conflict, the 
former must give place ; and as the question 
cannot be left to individual determination, it 
must be regulated by law. 

Public uses have been declared with 
respect to roads, ferries, pipe-lines, water¬ 
works, public schools and like matters, for 
which lands may be appropriated, paying to 
the owner just compensation, provided that 
there shall not be invasion of the homes of 
the living or the burial places of the dead. 
The question of private property in land, in 
this country, is practically limited to a dis¬ 
cussion of public uses; it may be conceded 


174 


MAN AND LABOU. 


that these are not yet fully declared, and 
that it is within the power of legislators, 
under the supervision of the courts, to enlarge 
them without any invasion of natural rights, 
or violation of the organic laws. The theo¬ 
retical reform of confiscation of private pro¬ 
perty in land is barred so effectively that it 
is unprofitable to discuss it. 

State ownership of lands is no novelty. 
Except as to proprietary and colonial grants, 
all titles begin with a patent from a state or 
the national government; and experience has 
shown that such public ownership is justifi¬ 
able only as a necessity; that under it lands 
can neither be cared for properly nor dis¬ 
posed of honestly. 

There is nothing in the way of communal 
holding of lands; there is plenty of virgin soil 
on which the experiment can be tried, and if 
successful it will not be necessary to make it 
compulsory upon anybody. 

It goes without saying that the man who 
wants land can get it; it is only the man who 
wants somebody else’s land without paying 
for it, who has any grievance under the land 
system of the United States. 

Limitation upon the amount of land which 
may be held by corporations is a matter of 


MAN AND LABOR. 


175 


public policy. Corporations have no natural 
rights; they have only such rights as are con¬ 
ferred upon them by law. 

Limitation upon the amount of land which 
may be held by individuals has been often 
proposed and also tried, but never with effect; 
and it is not a question of great importance 
in this country, where the laws of inheritance 
may be generally trusted to dissipate estates 
in land, of which there are few of magnitude 
which are the result of individual enterprise 
and labor. There are many obtained through 
the incapacity of the national government to 
either wisely or honestly administer its trust 
as owner of vast bodies of public lands, which 
shows the impolicy of making the state or 
nation the universal landlord by confiscation 
of private rights. It is because of govern¬ 
mental ineptitude, or corruption, that the 
speculator has outrun the pioneer, and caused 
grievances which call for redress. 

We are not moved by pictures of the 
misery of “the child born upon a planet 
which is fully occupied by others, and un¬ 
able to find a spot on which it is not a 
trespasser,” intended to teach us that every 
child has a natural right to the inheritance 
of land. The planet is not fully occupied, 


176 


MAN ANT) LABOR. 


far from it. The unjust appropriation and 
misuse of land in England and Ireland is 
not a picture of the earth; and if we suppose 
the child to be born upon an entirety uncul¬ 
tivated and unappropriated planet or island, 
how much better off would it be ? Every 
child has an estate in the labors which have 
subdued the earth and made it fruitful, and 
replaced savage life bv civilization, which is 
of incalculable value. The fact that a child 
inherits land or not, or anything or not. does 
not determine its happiness or usefulness, or 
the reverse. What benefit would it be to 
any child if every child inherited land ? 
What would they do with it? Somebody 
must toil to make it fruitful, for land with¬ 
out labor is nothing. A proposition that 
every child should inherit a grand piano 
would be as sensible. 

Agrarian agitation is not new.. It is as 
old as the Iloman commonwealth, in which 
the land question related solely to the public 
domain, and not to the right of private own¬ 
ership. It was a contest between plebeian 
and patrician, somewhat like that between 
homesteaders and speculators in our western 
states and territories. 

As to dividing all the lands among all the 


MAN AND LABOR. 


177 


people, it cannot be done; it is useless to 
propose it, and if it were possible it would 
be an immeasureable calamity—a single year 
would induce starvation, and persistence 
would lead to desolation. To make every 
man a farmer would insure a lack of food 
and certainly a lack of everything else. It 
is only in purely agricultural communities 
that famines have occurred during the pres¬ 
ent century, or are likely to occur in future. 
Agriculture, though the earliest of the arts, is 
the latest and the slowest in the march of im¬ 
provement; and without alliance with the 
other arts, it would be incapable to-day of 
supplying the population of the earth with 
food. The other arts have done much for 
agriculture, yet their ministry to it is yet 
feeble and inefficient compared to what it 
will be in the future. 

The United States has been a good coun¬ 
try for poor men for many reasons, one of 
which has been the easiness with which 
ownership of land could be acquired, a con¬ 
dition which should be preserved as fully 
and as long as possible; but it has not been 
any considerable factor in enhancing the 
rate of wages in manufacturing industries. 
The wages of agricultural laborers, the 
12 


178 


MAN AND LABOK. 


prices of food, and the value of land, are en¬ 
hanced in proportion to the growth and 
contiguity of manufactures; and if we could 
conceive of this country without manufact¬ 
ures, we would have a state in which land 
and food and labor would have no market 
value. 

The American workingman has a strong 
vantage ground which he can hold as long 
as he is protected against the destructive 
forces of free trade. Within a community 
or country where there is no interference 
from abroad, industries that are naturally 
dependent tend to equality in productiveness 
and rewards, and the prosperity of one is a 
benefit to the others and to society. Pro¬ 
tection to home industry has built up Amer¬ 
ican manufactures, and given large wages to 
Workingmen; this in turn has developed and 
improved American agriculture, and has in¬ 
creased its rewards by giving it an enor¬ 
mously increased product, and the result has 
been plenty for everybody. 

We refuse to recognize the tramp as a 
representative of labor, or as a result of pri¬ 
vate ownership of land, which it is said has 
robbed him of his inheritance and made him 
a wanderer upon the face of the earth. He 


MAN AXt> LAtlOR. 


179 


is a product of misguided benevolence, which 
feeds and clothes him, and gives him money 
and sustains his useless and generally vil¬ 
lainous existence. If there is one unfortu¬ 
nate and deserving workingman to a thou- 
sand voluntary barbarians among these 
enemies of society, which we doubt, it is 
better that lie should perish of starvation 
than that lie should be saved from it at the 
cost of maintaining his degraded and dan¬ 
gerous associates. This is not a hard saying, 
for such an honest poor man could not lose 
his life more worthily, nor would his case 
differ from that of the soldier who falls 
upon the battle-field in the defense of his 
country. 

Agriculture requires not only a special 
training, but also certain moral qualities in 
those who prosecute it successfully. Farm¬ 
ing in America lias a life of its own, and few 
succeed in it who have not been bred to it. 
Our farmers are a sturdy race, content with 
little society outside of the home, constant 
in the exercise of foresight and economy, 
satisfied with a moderate competence, and 
possessing a virtuous family life by being 
full of labor, and by the help of the simple 
religious faith which they generally profess, 


180 


MAN AND LABOR. 


which is the largest social element in their 
lives. To take the land from them and give 
it to the debased and vicious inhabitants of 
city slums is the latest theory of land reform, 
commended to American workingmen as an 
effectual and proper means of insuring pro¬ 
gress without poverty. 


NATURAL LAW OF POPULATION. 


It is in accordance with our principles of 
political economy, that man should be success¬ 
ful in his struggle with nature, in the propor¬ 
tion that there is improvement of society. 
A virtuous family life, obedience to the laws, 
respect for religion, popular education and 
progress in the arts, improvements in medi¬ 
cal and sanitary science, diversification and 
association of industries, and peace,—those 
things are the necessary conditions of 
success, or, in other words, of plenty. To 
our view the struggle of man with nature is 
not hopeless, nor is it useless^ it is a neces¬ 
sary training of man and of the race, benefi¬ 
cently devised to develop talent and charac¬ 
ter, and to give infinite and beautiful variety 
and use to the lives and labors of mankind. 

The science of English political economy, 
taught in American schools and colleges, 
takes little or no account of our way to 
wealth; and, indeed, it will show conclusively 
that our way is no thoroughfare; that in the 
strife of man with nature if he will have 
181 



182 


MAN AND LABOR. 


virtue and health and peace as allies, he is 
doomed to defeat; that wealth thus obtained 
ends in Avant, and plenty thus secured ends 
in starvation; that without the vices of 
human nature and the evils of society the 
earth would refuse adequate sustenance to 
its inhabitants. 

The Malthusian laAV of population in its 
relations to food, with its supplementary 
theory of the occupation of the soil, is the 
corner stone of English political economy. 

Thomas Robert Mai thus, an English cler¬ 
gyman, in his “Principles of Population,” 
published about the beginning of this cen¬ 
tury, announced as a universal law, the con¬ 
stant tendency of the human race to increase 
beyond the means of subsistence, a principle 
Avhich Avould be illustrated everyAvliere in 
the history of mankind Avere it not for the 
checks to the increase of population Avliich 
are ahvays and everywhere operath T e. The 
ultimate check of famine does not come in 
play to prove the theory, because wars and 
pestilence and the ignorance and the vices 
of mankind, destroy multitudes of human 
beings or shorten their lives, and maintain 
an equilibrium betAveen mouths and food. 

Under the best circumstances he held that 


MAN AND LABOR. 


183 


food can increase only in an arithmetical 
ratio, as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, etc., while 
population increases in geometrical ratio as 
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc. 

Assuming therefore, that the population 
unchecked would double itself every twenty- 
five years, and taking the population of 
England at eleven millions, the results pre¬ 
dicted at successive periods of twenty-five 
years were as follows: 

POPULATION. 

list, period. period. Sd period. 5th period. 5th period. 

11,000,000 . 22,000,000. 44,000,000 . 88,000,000. 176,000,000 

FOOD. 

Enough Food Food for Food for Food for 
food. doubled. 33,000,000. 44,000,000. 55,000,000. 

The check of famine would necessarily 

become operative in fifty years; and the 
progress of population at the normal rate 
could not continue for seventy-five years, at 
the end of which one-half of the race would 
be unprovided for. 

Having announced the principle as self- 
evident, the author proceeded to the neces¬ 
sary task of accounting for its failure to 
assert itself, by making a survey of the 
globe, taking one country after another, and 
showing that checks to population were 
everywhere operative. No country had been 


184 


MAN AND LABOR. 


free from war, every country had been rav¬ 
aged by disease, and everywhere he found 
the vices prevailing which enfeeble mankind 
and shorten his days upon the earth. His 
book, written in excellent English, a model 
for simplicity and purity of style, is a pain¬ 
ful catalogue of the vices of civilization and 
the miseries of savage life. As he found the 
earth nowhere incapable of supplying its 
inhabitants with food, his theory of popula¬ 
tion was but a plausible assumption, needing 
the more scientific exposition, which it owes 
to another English writer. The doctrine of 
rent, of which David Eicardo is the accredited 
author, is based upon a theory of the occupa¬ 
tion of the soil that is simple and apparently 
self-evident. The most productive lands are 
most desirable; and it is quite natural to 
suppose that in the settlement of a country 
they would be taken by the first comers. In 
the earliest stages of society, when men are 
few in numbers, the lands of best quality 
—having the highest fertility—will be first 
occupied; and it follows that as population 
increases resort must be had to lands of a 
less degree of fertility, and so on progres¬ 
sively to the poorer and still poorer soils— 
the whole land under cultivation yielding 


MAN AND LABOR. 


ls5 


constantly diminishing returns to the labor 
expended upon it. 

Tabulating the assumed difference in pro¬ 
ductiveness between lands of the first quality 
producing, say fifty bushels to the acre, and 
lands of the second quality producing but 
forty, and so on downward, he demonstrated 
how rents naturally arose; and showed that 
the landlord’s share is the whole difference 
of product of the land leased to his tenants 
and that of the poorest land under cultiva¬ 
tion. This was an admirable vindication of 
the natural justice of the modern commer¬ 
cial character of English rents, and it was 
received with instant favor. It is evident 
also that it furnished what was lacking in 
the Malthusian theory of the relations of 
population to its means of support, by giving 
an apparently good reason for the assump¬ 
tion that increase of men must be attended 
by a decline in the supply of food ; as there 
would necessarily be a place, either that 
fixed by Malthus or some other point, where 
unchecked increase of population must en¬ 
counter the check of famine. 

This doctrine of the dismal science was 
accepted, with some qualifications, by John 
Stuart Mill, who states it thus: 


ISO 


MAN AND LABOR. 


“ After a certain and not very advanced 
stage in tlie progress of agriculture, as soon 
in fact as men have applied themselves 
to cultivation with any energy, and have 
brought to it any tolerable tools, from that 
time it is the law of production from the 
land, that in any given state of agricultural 
skill and knowledge, by increasing the labor 
the produce is not increased in an equal de¬ 
gree ; doubling the labor does not double the 
produce. This general law of agricultural 
industry is the most important proposition 
in political economy. Were the law different 
nearly all the phenomena of the production 
and distribution of wealth would be other 
than it is.” 

This alleged law of the constantly declin¬ 
ing productiveness of agriculture, supple¬ 
ments with diabolical ingenuity Eicardo’s 
theory of the occupation of the soil. Man* 
and nature are hopelessly at strife; the 
scheme of the universe is irremediably vicious; 
and the pitiableness of the situation of the 
race would be inadequately described as 
“ between the devil and the deep sea.” 

It would have been more profitable to us, 
had Mr. Mill fixed the period, say in English 
history, when men began to cultivate with 


MAN AND LABOK. 


187 


energy and use tolerable tools. W ould lie go 
back to the Heptarchy, or did it come in with 
Alfred the Great, or William the Conqueror ? 
If he had only settled this, ive could comfort¬ 
ably trace the decline in the productiveness 
of the soil as increased labor has been ex¬ 
pended upon it. If however we should find 
that there has been enormously increased 
productiveness, and that this has been 
marked by constant withdrawal of a larger 
proportion of the whole people from agri¬ 
cultural labors, we. shall wonder when this 
invincible and universal law will begin to op¬ 
erate. Construed to mean, as is sometimes 
the case, that after a particular piece of 
ground lias been cultivated with the most 
complete intelligence and to the utmost 
limit, then further labor expended upon it 
will meet with diminishing returns; it is a 
stupid truism. Any particular man or ani¬ 
mal or machine has a limit of efficiency, and 
a bit of ground is not an exception to this 
rule. Possibly there is somewhere an acre 
of ground, that is cultivated to the limit of 
its efficiency gauged by the present state 
of science; but to assume that all the land 
has been, or ever can be, so cultivated, is 
comparable with the other assumption that 


188 


MAN AND LABOR. 


if the sky should fall larks would be plen¬ 
tiful. 

Ricardo's theory of the occupation of the 
soil, has not a shred of historic basis; nor 
can it be sustained by an examination of the 
present state of agricultural industry. The 
fact is that cultivation does not begin 
with the richest soils; and there are conclus¬ 
ive reasons why it cannot, as has been fully 
shown by Mr. Carey, who has been at the 
pains to make a survey of the earth, from 
which he shows, not only that the richest 
soils are not the first to be occupied, but that 
almost everywhere they are still unsubdued. 
The earth is merely a machine employed by 
man. In all other industries man begins 
with the poorest tools and proceeds to the 
better ones; and it would be anomalous if in 
agriculture he should begin his labors with 
the best tools and proceed to the poorer 
ones. The investigations of Mr. Carey have 
been verified in the most painstaking way 
by E. Pershine Smith, Professor Thompson 
and others, and we refer to them for evi¬ 
dence too large to quote here, which refutes 
the doctrine of Ricardo.* It is wholly unten¬ 
able and it must go; the beautiful mathe- 


* See also Rev, Richard Jones. 



MAN AND LABOR. 


189 


matical law of the landlords’ natural rights 
must go with it, and, as a consequence, 
“ nearly all the phenomena of the production 
and distribution of wealth must be other 
than they are ” set forth in English political 
economy. 

It must be said further that the product¬ 
iveness of the soil is not a question of its 
natural fertility, but of the state of the art 
of agriculture, which depends upon the other 
arts, and upon the sciences for its improve¬ 
ment and efficiency. The new science of 
chemistry has but recently been drawn to 
the help of the husbandman, and much may 
be expected from it. Chemistry is itself in 
its infancy; it can teach us the constituents 
of the soil, and of vegetable foods; and we 
find that the latter are composed of elements 
which are practically illimitable and inex¬ 
haustible—elements drawn in a small degree 
from the earth, and almost wholly from the 
air, which is the cradle and the grave of 
plant life. When analytical chemistry has 
said its last word we do not know what syn¬ 
thetical chemistry may accomplish; it may 
imitate or supplement vital force in the 
organization of food for the human race, or 
give to it enormously greater efficiency. 


190 


MAN AND LABOll. 


The race gets what it needs when it is fitted 
for it, and our suggestion cannot be dismissed 
as fanciful or impossible. The scientist too* 
often lacks imagination, he should take the 
advice of Mephistopheles to Faust, and 
league himself with a poet. The science of 
chemistry may end where it began. Alchemy 
may be really a lost art, and the chemist 
of the future, may outdo its achievement in 
making gold, bv making a potato. 

The theories of Uicardo hold their place 
in the writings of economists in spite of the 
lack of historical foundation and the contra¬ 
diction of current facts easily observed. 
Mr. Mill examined Mr. Carey’s refutation of 
the English doctrine of the occupation of 
the soil without being convinced by it. A 
symmetrical theory - may defy forever a 
world of facts. The argument against the 
policy of protection in the United States, 
is sustained by the assumption that has been 
a thousand times refuted, that “ the tariff is 
a tax upon the consumer,” and by represen¬ 
tation of facts, which the slightest examina¬ 
tion shows to be flagrant mistakes or mali¬ 
cious inventions. Henry George has pre¬ 
sented a picture of the miseries of Ameri¬ 
can workingmen, which is purely imaginary, 


MAN AND LABOR. 


191 


yet thousands of workingmen have read 
‘•Progress and Poverty” with apparent ap¬ 
proval. One may despair of teaching any 
general truth which must be received as a 
matter of evidence, for every man sees the 
facts in accordance with his theory of what 
they should be and not as they really are. 

With respect to the relations of popula¬ 
tion to the means of subsistence, what 
should be the fact ? Is there no intelligible 
theory of the subject to be drawn from what 
we know of the character and operation of 
other natural laws; or is this matter so far out¬ 
side of the domain of science that it has no 
word to say in vindication of the scheme of 
the universe ? Is it true, that if the nations 
should learn war no more, if we should have 
the morality of the four gospels, and if 
medical and sanitary science should effect¬ 
ively protect mankind from the ravages of 
disease, the race would, in a few centuries, 
so increase that it would not find food to 
eat, or even standing-room on the globe if 
the heavens should rain down manna for its 
support ? Did God bless mankind, as the 
record alleges, when he said unto them, “ Be 
fruitful and multiply and replenish the 
earth,” or was it a covert curse? 


192 


MAN AND LABOR. 


We have said that, in his survey of the 
globe, Malthus nowhere found a redundant 
population, nor can it be found to-day. Sta¬ 
tistics do not show that there is a uniform 
rate of increase of population, and the sup¬ 
posed analogies of the animal and vegetable 
kingdoms are misleading. It may be true 
that if the spawn of fishes were not des¬ 
troyed they would soon fill all the seas. It 
is true of Nature, as Tennyson says, that 
Of fifty seeds, 

She often brings but one to bear, 
and that if all the progeny of a single spe¬ 
cies should survive, there would be no room 
for other life. This prodigality in the lower 
world serves a purpose, for its creatures are 
destined for the subsistence of one another, 
and all are food for man. 

We do not know what the life principle 
is—as yet it lies outside of physics. It is 
different from any known elements of mat¬ 
ter; yet it is something, and it would be quite 
philosophical, and strictly in accordance 
with the present drift of scientific thought, 
to assume that vital force is a certain fixed 
quantity, and that it has definite affinities 
determining broadly % its operation. Let us 
assume further, that the combinations of 


MAN AXB LABOfc. 


193 


matter and vital force are graduated upon a 
scale of proportions, beginning, we will say 
for the purpose of illustration, at a thousand 
atoms of matter to one of vital force, and 
ascending by stages through additions of 
units of vital force until you have a thou¬ 
sand atoms of vital force to a thousand 
atoms of matter, or an atom of one for an 
atom of the other, this being the ultimate 
combination at the ascending end of the 
scale. Let us place at one extremity of this 
scale the lowest form of organized life— 
having a thousand atoms of body to one of 
spirit—and at the other extreme place man, 
in whom matter and vital force are equally 
matched, or, in other words, in whom mat¬ 
ter and spirit are in equilibrium. 

Upon this assumption the tendency of vi¬ 
tal force to organize itself in matter would 
be greatest along the lines of least resist¬ 
ance;'a thousand times greater in the direc¬ 
tion of the lowest form than in the direc¬ 
tion of the highest,and soon proportionally 
throughout the scale; and these definite 
proportional attractions, as they may be 
called, acting upon a fixed amount of vital 
force, must preserve within certain well- 
defined general limits, with occasional aber- 
13 


194 


MAN AND LABOR. 


rations, a harmonious balance of variously 
organized animated nature, which balance 
will only be disturbed by exceptional and 
partial calamity, or by the ignorant or crimi¬ 
nal actions of mankind. If the law be thus, 
then, upon any disturbance of the equi¬ 
librium there would be a special effort for its 
restoration, redundancy anywhere could not 
be maintained, and organizations would be¬ 
come more prolific under circumstances which 
threatened their extinction. 

We do not care at this time to inquire 
whether vital force, or spirit, is identical with 
mind, or whether it is merely its partial or 
complete correspondent and concomitant; 
and we wdl not now undertake a survey of 
animated nature, to show how fully its phe¬ 
nomena may sustain our theory, and how 
apparent exceptions to it may be explained. 
It is in harmony with what we know of the 
nature and operation of other forces; and de¬ 
serves a place among the working hypotheses 
of science. 

As deductions from it, we should hold that 
life is prolific inversely in proportion to 
organization, being greatest in the least 
organized, and least in the most highly 
organized creatures. 


MAN AND LABOR. 


195 


That life is prolific inversely in proportion 
to its duration, 

Insects that only may 
Live in a sun-bright ray 

are brought forth by millions; the period of 
gestation of the long-lived elephant is nearly 
two years. 

That life is prolific inversely in proportion 
to the means of maintaining it—the victims 
of poverty, famine and distress are most 
fertile, increase of births follows fast upon 
the ravages of war and disease to make good 
their waste and preserve the equilibrium. 
Luxury is barren — misery has plenty of 
children. 

Physicians and philanthropists may be 
safely encouraged in their good work of 
prolonging the life of man upon the earth ; 
there will be food for all and room for all. 
In this world outside of the British Islands, 
and the countries cursed by English rule, we 
shall never have too many men. 


IMAGINARY WRONGS - IMPOS¬ 
SIBLE REMEDIES. 


In all progressive communities the things 
which constantly increase in value are land 
and labor. There is a theory that increase 
in the value of land is an injury to labor; that 
in some way labor might be increased in 
value by rendering land valueless. Work¬ 
ingmen are told that all the benefits of 
progress—that the improvements of every 
sort, and the accumulations of every sort, are 
absorbed by the owners of land, who are 
few, and, as a consequence, the working 
masses are constantly declining to a meaner 
condition, and are doomed to hopeless lives 
of vice and misery. They are told that it is 
useless for them to practice industry and 
thrift; it will avail nothing to be virtuous; 
teaching and preaching are a mockery ; and 
private and organized charities are an insult, 
so long as there is private property in land. 

Presented in language that has a sort of 
philanthropic glow, and heightened in inter¬ 
est by descriptions of the miseries of de- 
196 



MAN AND LABOR. 


197 


based and degraded masses in the large 
cities—with pathetic reference to the tramp, 
that terror of rural communities,—this gos¬ 
pel of the slums appeals strongly to the 
common weakness of men to excuse their 
errors to themselves, and to attribute their 
failures to some cause beyond their own con¬ 
trol. The inventor of this imaginary wrong 
has devised an impracticable remedy for it; 
a cure for all these ills, and indeed the only 
possible cure, is the confiscation of land, 
which is to be accomplished by taxing it to its 
full rental value, whether it is leased to 
others or occupied by the owner. It is 
argued that under this system the acquisition 
of land would be rendered easy to all; that 
it would not be monopolized by any; and 
that the state, deriving large revenues from 
this source, would have an enormous surplus 
of income to distribute in some way back to 
the community. 

Perceiving that there must be some motive 
to induce expenditure upon the land, as 
nobody, for instance, would build a house, if 
the state or somebody else could take it 
away from him, the author of this scheme 
proposes to recognize the right of ownership 
in improvements; and taxation is therefore 


198 


MAN AND LABOR. 


to be limited to the value of the land only, as 
distinguished from the improvements upon 
it. This theory may be tried more easily 
than any other form of confiscation, for the 
taxing power as an attribute of sovereignty, 
is generally free from limitations; but its 
author should have devised the machinery 
for carrying it out, or shown at least, that it 
is practicable. 

In an effort to supply this omission, we 
will consider separately the possible applica¬ 
tion of this tax system to lands used in am- 
culture and lands used for buildings only— 
country land and city land. As to the 
former, it is necessary to reiterate the fact, 
that its entire value consists in its improve¬ 
ments. Clearing, draining, fencing, fertiliz¬ 
ing and tilling have made it what it is, irre¬ 
spective of the buildings upon it. It is 
impossible to value a farm made by the 
labors of the pioneer and his family, by sev¬ 
ering the land from the improvements. The 
land is the improvements. 

Disregarding the life-long labors of two or 
three generations of husbandmen, we may 
endeavor to sever the land from the build¬ 
ings and other structures upon it, calling 
these only improvements ; and try to tax the 


I 


MAN ANI) LABOR. 


199 


land, which is conceived to be naked, at its 
full rental value. Put in tins way, we can 
think of A., or any other separate farm, as 
having a value; but this is fallacious, for we 
must think of all the farms—twenty-six, or 
twenty-six thousand—as being deprived of 
improvements; and, in this case, it would 
appear that none of them would have a 
rental value. This proper view also disposes 
of the theory of an unearned increment of 
value, inhering and cumulating itself in 
land, and derived from the progress of soci¬ 
ety, to which it is assumed the land-owner 
has contributed nothing, and which may, 
therefore, be confiscated for the benefit of 
society. Upon examination it appears that 
this increment does not belong to the land 
at all, but solely to improvements, ownership 
of which is not to be disputed, and which are 
to be free front taxation. 

The land of the first settler, A, who takes 
up a tract of wilderness, becomes more valu¬ 
able, in the sense that it will sell or rent for 
more money, when I> makes an improved 
farm in the neighborhood, and so on as C, 
D and others follow his example. The 
additional value is owing to improvements 
altogether, and it would disappear at once if 


200 


MAN AND LABOR. 


they were obliterated. Farm A will sell or 
rent for more because of the improvements 
made on farm B, C, etc. Relegate the lat¬ 
ter to the wilderness state, and the incre¬ 
ment of value in farm A will disappear. 
To treat this increment of value or price in 
farm A as unearned, and to confiscate it, 
would be a mistake, as farm A must have 
contributed to this common increment as 
much as it has received from it; or if it has 
not, there are not scales fine enough in 
which to weigh the quantities and define the 
balances of debt and credit. 

In most cases there is no way to get at 
the rental value of agricultural lands includ¬ 
ing improvements. In this country, farm 
land is generally tilled bv the owner, who is 
his own landlord, his own farmer, and his 
own laborer. The census reports show that 
seventy-four per centum of farms are tilled 
by the owners; and, of leased land, eighteen 
per cent, farmed on the shares, and but 
eight pei 1 cent, paying money rental. Ex¬ 
cluding the Southern States, and taking the 
oldest states composing the North Atlantic 
group, the proportions are eighty-four per 
cent, tilled by owners, nine per cent, paying 
produce rental, and seven per cent, paying 


MAX AND LABOR. 


201 


money rental; while in the Western group 
of states the farms paying a money rental 
drop to five per centum of the whole. 

The difficulty which this state of agricul¬ 
ture presents is evaded by the author whose 
theory we are discussing, by a resort to the 
economic rent of Ricardo, which would be 
worked out in this way. Take farm A and 
find the difference in productiveness between 
it and the poorest land under cultivation in 
the country or community, and this differ¬ 
ence will be the economic rent or landlord's 
share; a difference falsely alleged to be 
owing to inherent difference in the natural 
fertility of the soil, and therefore, a contri¬ 
bution of nature. If farm A produces thirty 
bushels of grain to the acre, and farm X 
produces but ten bushels to the acre, then 
the difference is the rental of A, or of 
its grain land, i.e., twenty bushels to the 
acre. Of course this comparison must be 
extended to all the farm products of A and 
X—grain and hay, butter and eggs, calves 
and colts, etc.—and the whole difference is 
the economic rental. This, however, is not 
to be all confiscated by taxation, but an 
allowance is to be made and left to the 
farmer for so much of it as is owing to the 


MAN AND LABOR. 


202 

improvements which belong to him—a neat 
little problem to solve, as we have shown. 
We would like any convert to this theory to 
work it out if he can; it is too complicated 
for us. And we wonder who will represent 
the state in this business; where the asses¬ 
sors can be found who will make practical 
application of this principle in the levy of 
taxes. 

Rents payable in money, probably bear a 
certain proportion to rents payable in kind, 
as the latter system so largely predominates. 
These produce rents vary somewhat in differ¬ 
ent localities; but they afford no evidence of 
the growing power of the landlords, for the 
customary shares of landlord and tenant are 
the same now that they were fifty years ago. 
Improvement in agriculture has increased 
the product; the landlord has a larger re¬ 
ward in rent, but there is a like proportional 
'increase in the share of the tenant. 

Regarded as an investment, the acquisition 
of farm lands for the purpose of letting them 
to tenants, is far from being attractive, and 
in point of fact it is not practical. Except 
in that transient phase of the industry known 
as bonanza farming, and possibly and doubt¬ 
fully in cotton and sugar planting, there is 


MAX AND LABOK. 


203 


no profit in the ownership of farm lands to 
anybody but the man who works with bis 
own hands; and the holding of such lands 
outside of the Southern States of the Union, 
by anybody but practical farmers, is left to 
the very wealthy, who can afford an expens¬ 
ive amusement. To be a land owner in this 
country is not a distinction; there is no social 
consideration going along with it; and the 
power of the land owner is much less than 
that of the money lender; the former gets at 
best about three per centum upon his invest¬ 
ment in farm lands, and it is very difficult to 
make him out to be a public robber. 

Passing from the consideration of farm 
lands let us take a case which is simpler, in 
a vacant lot in a city, and try the confisca¬ 
tion theory upon it. We will regard it as 
vacant land, though it has paid for paving, 
and water, and police, and courts—improve¬ 
ments which belong to it, but are not actu¬ 
ally on it. We will see if the system of tax¬ 
ing land to its full rental value will render 
it any easier for poor men to acquire this 
piece of property. 

The lot we will say is worth twenty thou¬ 
sand dollars, and the existing tax rate is say 
ten mills upon a full valuation, making the 


204 


MAX AND LABOR. 


annual tax two hundred dollars. If naked 
ground in the vicinity rents at six per 
centum of its value, the confiscation tax rate 
upon this property would be twelve hundred 
dollars. The imposition of this tax it is said 
will oblige the owner to build, or if he does 
not, and in case of non-payment, there will 
be a sale for taxes, and the land will go to 
some one who will improve it. 

We will suppose that the owner builds, that 
he erects houses worth twenty thousand dol¬ 
lars. The usual income from such property is 
about six per centum upon the investment, 
and the rental under the present system 
would be, say twenty-four hundred dollars. 
The rental under the confiscation system 
would not be less than twenty-four hundred 
dollars, for there is no reason why it should 
be reduced. The tenant would pay as much 
as ever, though the landlord would keep but 
half of the rent, the other half being paid 
away by him in taxes. Thus far it would 
appear that there is no cheapening of rents 
or benefit to tenants. But as a return of 
three per centum upon investments in houses 
will not induce such investments, they will 
not be made unless the usual rewards of 
capital can be gained from them; and it is 


MAN ANt) LABOR. 


205 


not at all clear that the rent demanded for 
the improvements alone would not be equal 
to that formerly paid for the improvements 
and the land. The owner, whether prior or 
subsequent to confiscation by sale, cannot 
get the ordinary interest upon his capital 
invested in improvements, unless he can 
make his tenant pay the government tax on 
the land. Either this will be the result, or 
there will be a positive check to improve¬ 
ments—the houses will be meaner or the rents 
will be higher, or both results will follow; 
there will be a check to progress and no 
diminution of poverty. 

From any point of view the ground rent 
to the state is the equivalent of a full pur¬ 
chase price for the land, and an enormous 
injury is done to present owners without any 
benefit to tenants or to future owners, 
lender this system it would not be a bit 
easier for a poor man to acquire land than 
it is now, for the tax is simply equivalent to 
a ground rent or purchase money mortgage; 
and the poor man who has borrowed money 
on mortgage is never happy until he has dis¬ 
charged the debt. In this case he could 
never discharge the debt, and there would 
be always present to him the danger of 


206 


MAN AND LABOR. 


having his home sold by summary process 
upon a failure to pay the large annual dues • 
to the state. The most useful charity in 
which the state could expend its confiscatory 
taxes, would he in paying everybody’s taxes, 
which would make the system quire complete. 

We will suppose that the owner of the lot 
of ground subject to taxes of t welve hundred 
dollars a year, is unable to improve it by 
building upon it, and is unable to pay the 
taxes. All that the state can do then, will 
be to sell it, and it must be sold promptly, 
for arrears can never be collected. The land 
has no value as the confiscation tax covers 
its entire rental value. The state must buy 
it and hold it until somebody will take it at 
any price, or at no price, subject to the 
ground-rent taxes. This is precisely what 
the owner would have been willing to do 
with it, and the land is not any cheaper 
under the confiscation system than it was 
before. The owner has been ruined and the 
poor man who wants land has not been bene¬ 
fited; there are two poor men where there 
was but one before. 

There is nothing in the scheme except a 
robbery of present owners of land, and the 
insecurity and Calamities attending universal 


MAN AND LABOR. 


207 


and perpetual ground-rent taxes on the one 
side, and hypothetical benefits to.be derived 
from state charities on the other side. 

This system, which puts every home in 
annual peril, is to be administered by public 
officials, who, according to its author, are 
hopelessly corrupt and unfit to be trusted with 
the limited powers they now exercise. They, 
and a vastly increased number of like officers, 
will be intrusted with the duty of assessing 
and collecting and then distributing the 
entire rental value of all the lands; the most 
difficult calculations, the most delicate ad¬ 
justments, not in one case but in every case, 
will be committed to them, and enormous 
sums of money will be perpetually flowing 
through their hands. Under these circum¬ 
stances we are told it will be easy to 
guard the public service and keep it pure, 
and that only good men will be elected to 
office! 

Public and individual interest in agricul¬ 
ture is the same; it is that the sciences and 
arts shall make such progress that food shall 
constantly be more plentiful, and more easily 
obtained by all the people. Would not in¬ 
stability of land tenure result in scarcity ? 
Would not enormously burdensome taxes 


208 


MAN ANI) LABOR. 


upon land reappear in the prices of food, and 
if not, why not ? The system under which 
the Indian ryot cultivates the soil is not an 
improvement upon the land system of the 
United States. We insist that the title to 
land is no more sacred than the title to other 
things, and that with respect to it the public 
good is the supreme law; but who has dem¬ 
onstrated that all private property in land in 
this country, is detrimental to the public 
good ? 

We may be pardoned for this somewhat too 
extended discussion of a theory which might 
be properly dismissed with brief condemna¬ 
tion. It is put forth in a cheap book that 
has probably been more widely read than 
any similar publication; and its author having- 
secured his audience among workingmen, by 
awakening in them a sense of wrong, and 
offering them a malevolent and impossible 
remedy, will use his prestige as “the friend 
of labor,” greatly to their disadvantage, in 
the service of the free trade league. 


CONCLUSION. 


An essay upon man and labor may be 
regarded as incomplete, lacking a cata¬ 
logue of grievances, and of measures for 
their immediate redress. This is the popular 
side of the subject, and current literature is 
full of it. It is found in the magazines, 
cheap literary publications, and the daily 
newspapers. It is the favorite topic of poli¬ 
ticians, and it occupies the attention of state 
legislatures and the national congress. The 
most extravagant statements in regard to the 
condition and wrongs of workingmen readily 
pass current; and Doctors of Labor with in¬ 
fallible cures for all its ills, enjo}^ such repu¬ 
tation as the professional rain-maker has 
among his tribe of western Indians. 

This is not a popular work. We have no 
recipe for making everybody rich; indeed, 
we think it is not necessarily a crime or a 
felicity to be rich, nor is it necessarily a 
wrong or an infelicity to be poor. All the 
virtues do not belong to riches, and all the 
vices do not belong to poverty. From our 
14 209 



210 


MAN AND LABOK. 


observation of different conditions of life, we 
doubt if Henry George lias a charter to re¬ 
verse the bearing of the text in regard to the 
camel and the needle’s eye. 

The tendencies of civilization are toward 
improvement in the real rewards of labor; 
and progress in the past is a promise of what 
may be expected in the future. Students of 
history know that the past century lias been 
most fruitful in this respect; it is not neces¬ 
sary to resort to statistics to prove it, as there 
are such large facts as the emancipation from 
serfdom and slavery of whole populations of 
workingmen. The consequences are, per¬ 
haps, not what were expected, as neither 
freedom nor prosperity brings contentment ; 
and the great material progress of recent 
years is perhaps the prime cause of the prev¬ 
alent discontent. We do not care to fan its 
flames, nor do we regard it as useless; and at 
any rate we agree with the poet in preferring 
“ a hundred years of Europe to a cvcle of 
Cathay.” 

Without entering into painful particulars, 
we are willing to have social and industrial 
aberrations gauged by means of the natural 
laws which we have endeavored to estab¬ 
lish, 


MAN AND LABOR. 


211 


If labor in general is joyless, then this is 
contrary to natural laws; it is both criminal 
and unprofitable, and somebody should 
begin somewhere to set it right. Some one 
will attempt it when it is discovered that 
there is certainly money in it. 

If the real wages of the workingman are 
not constantly and steadily increasing with 
progress in the arts and sciences and im¬ 
provement in the community, this is a vio¬ 
lation of natural laws, which cannot be 
maintained as the laborer’s misfortune if it 
is not also his fault. 

Remedies for the real evils which afflict 
labor may not be far to seek. In the physi¬ 
cal sciences the most important and bene¬ 
ficial discoveries of recent years were always 
just at hand, and the wonder is that they 
were not found out sooner. They were not 
thought of, or if thought of they were deemed 
absurd or impossible. Could anything 
be more simple and easy than the Bessemer 
process and the telephone, the moment we 
know all about them ? Social science gives 
us no such grateful surprises, and why should 
it? It ignores moral forces altogether, it has 
not given them a trial, and it is possible that 
there are beneficent powers in man which 


212 


MAN AND LABOR. 


are waiting for the opportunity to manifest 
themselves. The one thing lacking is 
44 faith as a grain of mustard seed,” which 
this skeptical and materialistic age cannot 
supply. 

In so far as reference has been made in 
the course of these studies to the theories of 
evolution, there is no purpose of either as¬ 
senting to, or denying them. As far as our 
knowledge of the subject extends, attempts 
to trace and establish the evolution of intel¬ 
lect, morals, and religion have proceeded 
upon the lines of introspection and con¬ 
sciousness—a method which lias perpetually 
con fused phil oso ph y—o r h a ve used such data 
of facts, as are furnished by guesses at the 
ideas of ancient races, and so much of the 
mental life of savages as can be gleaned 
from the tales of travelers. The teacher to 
whom his own mental operations and 
the ideas of his neighbor are a mystery, 
has.no difficulty in establishing deductively, 
the origin and development of that which 
superstition still regards as the spiritual 
entity in man, as an incident of the physical 
organism and its material surroundings. 
AVe have merely suggested by a hint here 
and there, that the scientists have not yet 


MAN AND LABOR. 


213 


exhausted their side of the subject; and that 
their observations in comparative anatomy 
and physiology should be supplemented ami 
corrected bv studies in comparative psy¬ 
chology, which ma} r possibly give us an ant- 
man instead of an ape-man as the progenitor 
of the human race. Assumption of a few 
thousands or millions of missing links might 
be necessary, and would be but a trivial 
matter. 

The effort to define principles concisely 
can never be entirely successful; and a large 
margin is left on which the student may note 
the necessary qualifications and limitations. 
The usefulness of generalizations may consist 
in their approximate accuracy; if they possess 
this they have the office of opening up a new 
path in the world of thought, which although 
an uncertain track at first, may become at 
last a wide and easy way. 

Ignorance of human nature is the reproach 
of science and philosophy. Medicine and 
jurisprudence are as badly off in this respect, 
and as much at a loss as political economy; 
and something is gained in this unknown 
field, if we have suggested to future explorers 
a way to enter it. It may be too much to 
claim that we have defined even a few of the 


MAN AND LABOR. 


214 - 

principles of human nature, and indicated 
their right to be regarded as a part of the 
science of political economy. 

We may not safely deny to any mental 
trait, however difficult it may be to trace it, 
an influence in the direction of society. A 
group of ideas, dominant in village life, may 
continue in control and give almost a dis¬ 
tinctive personality to the great eit}q which 
the village becomes through a century of 
change and growth. Social movements are 
not to be certainly judged by surface waves, 
which winds may drive in one direction 
while the sea is being carried by its tides in 
the opposite way. To know something of 
the nature and laws of the social tides which 
govern the movement of the seas lias been 
the object of our studies. 

There are current tendencies of popular 
thought which endanger the productiveness 
of labor and the order of society, and it is a 
question if we shall have in this country a 
manifestation of their destructiveness. They 
do not originate here, but to follow our 
simile, neither do its high tides originate 
in the Bay of Fundy. We can make the 
danger imminent by abandoning our pro¬ 
tective policy, and imposing European con- 


MAN AND LABOK. 


215 


ditions of labor and life upon American 
workingmen. 

It would be easy to point out the influences, 
literary, political, and legislative, which tend 
to a culmination in violence, but it may be best 
to think of a few of the defenses of society. 
The farming population of the United 
States lies outside of the region of social dis¬ 
turbance, and it is a great conservative force. 
Race, and religion or the lack of it, will have 
much to do with the attitude of the work¬ 
ingman, and here popular prejudice is at 
fault. The race which has been the favorite 
subject of caricature has made within 
recent years the greatest progress in ways 
which tend to the improvement of the com¬ 
munity, and may be relied upon in a social 
emergency for all the uses of good citizen¬ 
ship. The church which bigotry has libeled 
with ignorant alliteration, has the most 
wholesome influence within a sphere which 
belongs to it exclusively, and it will use its 
great powers effectively for the maintenance 
of order and law. 

We shall see before the close of this century 
whether the apprehensions of social disturb¬ 
ances are well founded or otherwise. The 
rapidity with which such movements progress 


210 


MAN AND LABOE. 


with constant increment of violence, is 
happily described by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
in his story of “ Earth’s Holocaust,” and the 
theory which the author puts in the closing 
speech of “ a dark complexioned personage ” 
who has ample knowledge of human nature, 
may be accepted as a correct estimate of the 
effect of material progress without moral 
reform. 




























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